It’s a good idea to experiment with both longer and shorter captions to see how each performs. Analyze your Instagram Insights and see if you can spot any trends. Before committing to long-form captions, make sure you’ve examined what types of posts your audience enjoys most and least. A long caption that doesn’t resonate with your followers will receive little engagement. If you choose to write long form captions, you need to know your audience well. That helps your account be more discoverable to others.īless the Messy (the above example) knows her audience extraordinarily well and writes excellent captions that resonate with her followers. The more comments, the better, as Instagram will boost how you rank in the algorithm based on that increased engagement.

This is particularly true if the caption has a confessional tone that prompts followers to reveal something in turn, sparking a conversation. In many cases, longer captions result in increased engagement.

If the long caption truly adds value for your followers, then go for it! A caption should never be long simply for the sake of being long. Some influencers’ captions clock in at 100 words or more! Long captions often work well for beauty or parenting bloggers, travel guides, or educational content. Data projects that by this year, the average caption will be 405 characters, which is about 70 words. On the flip side, recent trends show that average Instagram caption lengths are going up. Yes, that’s even shorter than a tweet (which is now 280 characters rather than 140)! Sprout Social cites the sweet spot for Instagram captions as 138-150 characters. To ensure your caption can be read without clicking the “more” button, aim for 125 characters or fewer. Anything longer than that, you’ll need to hit the “more” button, and many people don’t. People typically will read the first three lines of a caption that appear. Eight seconds to capture someone’s attention on Instagram? That’s not much time at all! Typically the image attracts the person in the first place, and then their interest level dictates if they read the whole caption or not. A study by Microsoft showed that the average human attention span is just eight seconds. Remember, most people have short attention spans these days. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should, though, which we’ll get to later. Learn the Limitsįor starters, it’s important to know the limits on Instagram captions! The maximum caption length is 2,200 characters (which is pretty darn long!). Okay, Instagram has only existed for eleven years, so maybe not quite “age-old.” Nonetheless, one of the most common concerns I hear from clients is, “How do I write a good caption? How long should my caption be?” People are stumped by the art of the caption! Today on the blog I’m breaking down Instagram caption length. Determining how long your Instagram caption should be is an age-old dilemma.

One word instagram captions