 We're talking about how to write better Instagram captions here on The Journey. All right, Nealey, gotta ask. What do you think makes a good caption? I struggle with it in my personal life, like I post here and there a little bit, you post a lot of it, and your captions are always fire. She's downplaying it. Your caption game is on point, but your captions has to tell a story, whether it's about the photo itself or your journey, and it really shows a bit of your personality, right? Or it could be a joke. There's lots of different things that you can do to really up your Instagram caption game, and I'm so excited to actually go through that with you all today. I've said it before, I'll say it again. Social media, it's always changing. Another reason to subscribe to our channels so you always know what's happening. For example, algorithms, always changing. So while you can't control the algorithm, you can control the content. Yeah, which leads us into our first tip to writing better Instagram captions, and that's actually to create drafts. Don't just go and throw your photo in there and then write a caption on the fly. If you're a wordsmith, sure that would work, but for many of us, words are hard. Words are so hard. So those drafts are super important to really get out the content that you want and make sure it looks good. You can even ask your friends, your peers, your coworkers to say, hey, does this make sense, or can you give me your thoughts on it to kind of just go in and make it tweaks and adjustments and then post it when you're ready? Yeah, I mean, we literally just did that before this episode. I was like, hey, Nealey, I'm sharing this video of my friend in his band. He's trying to get more exposure. What do you think of this caption? Nealey replied, that's terrible. Not so many words, actually, that was exactly it. But no, it needed a little work, but it's good not to post right away. It's kind of marinate and let that caption just sit there with you if it makes sense. We'll post it, if not, make your adjustments. When it comes to your captions, put all the important stuff first. I know the character count is 2,200 and right about at line three or four, it cuts off anyways. So more the reason to have the important stuff earlier in your caption. Yeah, you really want to hook people in. And Instagram's even changing now where they're kind of playing around with how many lines actually show. Oh, I heard about that. So sometimes you'll get, maybe two, sometimes you get three or four, it just depends. But you really want to write whatever the most captivating part of your caption is right there. But no, these things could be things like questions or just like a random fact that like, drop people in. It could be anything that would want them to explore more. Oh, I love to do like alert with the little two emojis in between. So it's like, get people, do you feel the excitement? Right? I feel it. Alert, and then it's like all caps and then the rest you go into what that alert is about or a little PSA. Yeah, but sometimes that alert is just overhyped. And then I read the rest and like, ah, wasn't it alert? You're like, what is this PSA? Just let down. This is true with almost all types of marketing and advertising, but it is true with your captions as well. And it's to have a call to action. Call to action basically tells your audience to do something. Tag your friend. Like your photo. Give away. Ask a question down below. Those are the best. Those are the best. Especially when you can tag a friend or two, like there's a surf account that I follow. Oh, yours is the best, got it. Right, so there's a surf account that I follow and it's like tag two friends for a chance to win a surf trip. It's like, of course I'm gonna tag my friends, but they say right in the beginning of the caption and the stoke levels come early on. Yeah, another thing you can do is say link in the bio, right? Instagram only gives the option of having one link and that link is on your profile. So if you tell someone, hey, there's this awesome content, link in the bio, they're more likely to go and follow that link. That's your cool sweet stuff. One of my personal favorites when it comes to captions, use emojis. I mean, first of all, you can really add in your personality there. It could also save you some space on the caption so you can replace words throughout your caption. I know one of my favorites, I was camping recently, very cool experience. It was like the first time I'd camp where there's no bathrooms, there's no check-in. It's freedom camping. Oh, you were roughing it. Roughing it. Okay. And one of my favorite things, not only were the photos we got from that trip to put on Instagram, but the fun you can have with emojis and the captions for camping. Fire, tent, cactus. It really helps shorten. That's all the camping emojis she knows. And it just breaks up the content too, especially if you're doing long tail captions where it's just a ton of content, having emojis in there, it's just visually stimulating for our eyes and it makes it easier to read. Now this one is a somewhat of a touchy subject. There are a ton of different experts that say a ton of different things, but I'm gonna say to limit the number of hashtags you use in your post. At the end of the day, it just looks spammy. It looks like your keyword stuffing. It doesn't really flow. I don't think there's a specific number that makes sense for every account. You can do up to 30. I don't recommend that though. Because again, look spammy. I would probably keep it along the lines of like five to 14 somewhere in there and get that sweet spot. Make sure those hashtags are relevant to the content you're actually posting on because if someone goes on and explores on Instagram and comes across your hashtag and then checks out the post and it's not relevant, they're bouncing, it was just a waste. Totally. And hashtags work the same on Facebook and Twitter as well. And maybe there's some different trending hashtags there. You'll see some variants. But another thing I've seen as well that businesses are doing is where they'll actually enter down space, space, space, space, space and then put all the hashtags. So it's not the first thing you see when you come across that business's Instagram post. You see their caption and then the hashtags come later. How do you feel about that? So that works for you. Again, I would probably test. A lot of our brands are using the comment caption. That works great if you get a ton of comments on your account because it'll just get hidden and it still has the same effect, if you will, as posting the actual story. Totally. But if you don't, then it just looks like your couple lines and then the first comment is just a giant block of spammy keywords. So be mindful of the hashtags that you're using, not just how many, but what are you using and what I've seen for a variety of local businesses, they really leverage local hashtags. So I know when I travel to Austin, I search Austin Eats. So if you're a restaurant in Austin, ATX Eats is a great way to get in front of hungry customers. But also just within your industry, there's a OOTD outfit of the day. Obviously Naly knows about this. So if you have a retail store or a boutique, that'd be a great hashtag to incorporate. It's very trendy. Yeah and hashtags, there are super popular hashtags like OOTD and there's more specific ones like the local one. You wanna have a mix with your captions. Just because they're kind of fun to read, especially the super specific ones and then you still have that broad audience. Totally. Be sure to use your brand voice and this is something that's going to be authentic to you, but be sure you're consistent with it, right? So if one day you're on Instagram and your caption's a little snarky and then the next day it's just very rigid and professional, that doesn't line up, right? Right. If it were you and your Instagram account and I saw you being super professional and like serious with your captions, like what is wrong with that? Someone hijacked me. Someone hijacked you. Took over my account. It's not the quirky, goofy, fun loving Emma that we all know, right? Thanks Naly. And this happens with businesses as well when they, I know you're short on time so you have multiple people maybe posting on your behalf. Be careful of that because that employee might have a different voice than the next one and then it looks like a jumbled mess. There's lack of consistency there. So then you become off-brand. And our last tip for you is to cross promote your channel. So don't put all your eggs in one basket and solely focus on Instagram. There are plenty of other platforms out there like Twitter, Snapchat, what other ones? Facebook, Yelp, Google. I've seen cross promotion done beautifully for businesses on Instagram. Just reminding their followers like, hey, when was the first time that you dined with us? So what brought you here? Let us know over on Yelp and just to get them to go over there and leave some feedback about maybe their last visit or how they found you. Yeah, another popular one is heading over to their YouTube channel to see more content. I like those brands that'll kind of give you a teaser of the content they're putting out somewhere else and say, hey, if you want to see more, like check out the rest of this video, link in the bio. They're diversifying their follower stream, if you will, on those different platforms. So that way in the event that a social media platform is gone, they still have their followers. I don't know what happened with Vine. Vine, unfortunately, went away and everyone that solely focused on Vine struggled to get their followers on the platform because they just weren't there. They're basically starting from zero. So you don't want to do that with your brand. Focus on growing your Instagram, but as you do it, grow your other channels too. All right, that's a wrap. You just learned how to write better Instagram captions. Be sure to like this video. Also comment with your favorite emoji below. Yeah, subscribe to this channel and ring that bell to see these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you next time.