How To Use Instagram Captions For Growth

Instagram captions have fast become a place to story-tell and educate. From my experience, captions have driven a ton of business and also helped people engage with my work over the years. In this article, I’ll show you how to optimize your captions to help build your career and promote what you do.

1. Promote Your Product/Career

One reason why captions are great is that they aren’t as loud an image, Gif, or video. It’s an area where text can easily be consumed in bite-sized pieces, just like a book. In my experience growing the handle @Artist_growth_tips (before selling it), and now building @Musicspaceio, I’ve learned that you never want to make your captions ONLY about promoting something, and you need to make promotional captions about the user. For example, if you had some new merch out, here’s what you should and shouldn’t say:

All about you:

I need you guys to go check out my new merch and buy some! Link in bio!

About The Fans:

Hey guys! Thanks to you guys hyping me up, I’ve gone ahead and designed some new merch! It would mean a ton if you could check out my new merch and support so I can continue to make awesome music for you!

Notice how instead of “I’s”, more “you’s” are used in the second example. This puts the focus on your audience, and not just on you.

Always be thinking of ways to incorporate your audience into your promotional posts, whether it’s new merch you’re selling, a new song you’ve put out, or even trying to increase your newsletter followers. When people see that something is about them, and not just your brand, it makes them feel human again.

2. Document Your Career

Think of your Instagram captions as a virtual timeline of your achievements and struggles. It’s entirely your choice on how much you want to share online, but your struggles and achievements do two things really well:

Achievements: inspire people to grow
Struggles: show people you’re human and relatable.

Humans are naturally connected to and interested in stories. Since childhood, we’ve been crafted by the stories we either hear or watch. Whether it was a story told to us by our parents/grandparents, or movies from Disney, there’s something about stories that help us “belong to them” in a way. Your captions should be no different.

Each aspect of your branding is an art form, not just your songwriting and production. How you leave someone feeling after they’ve watched your music video, heard your song, or read a piece of content of yours all plays a part in the branding experience you give them. I’m sure there are also artists out there that even download custom font-types and colors on their websites to trigger an emotional response from audiences.

Ask yourself: How does this caption align with the experience I want to give my audience?

It’s important to remember: Some artists want that mystical, almost sort of laid back vibe where everything is minimal. This is okay too, but just ensure your content takes them on a journey at least. However, if you want to go deeper, unearth details fans didn’t know about you or even share struggles that allowed you to grow. We all love a good story, so make your captions come alive.

3. Use A Caption Editor

Have you ever come across a caption that was just a wall of text? Did it annoy you? It certainly frustrates me 😂.

An Instagram caption editor allows you to place “line breaks” between your text

Like

This

So that your caption is easier to consume. Some people love walls of text, but you have to take into consideration that you may have some audience members who have reading difficulties or simply prefer text that gets to the point.

A great (and free) caption editor to use is Spacie. You can also download the app here (one-off purchase of $2 - worth it long term).

4. Encourage Your Audience To Read

In order to drive streams, or build an engaged audience, it’s important to keep people engaged. If you’ve never paid attention to your captions, you’ll need to keep directing people to your captions to actually read what you’ve written. If you’ve neglected this for a while, you may need to hold mini giveaways or provide some real value (inspirational or motivational content) to get people to think: “woah this caption was full of valuable information”.

What you share is up to you, but be sure to use your stories posts to tell people to read your captions on your latest post(s)!.

Quick Hack: The First Two Sentences

When using the caption editor above, make your first two sentences heavily engaging, and direct your audience’s focus to where you want it to go. For example, with my captions on our I.G page, I always have a “Call to action” finger pointing down so people know where to read our caption. Here’s an example 👇

Notice how we consistently direct people’s focus? This helps give them a little “push” to get the most value out of our content!

I hope you enjoyed this!

If you enjoyed this article, please be sure to share this with someone who could also find some value in it. We spend a lot of time on these articles so a quick share is much appreciated! :)