While this obviously was not a perfect experiment, by looking at the results of pairs of similarly themed photos I could compare apples to apples. TL DR: Longer captions drive engagement, especially when it comes to comments. That being said, there’s definitely a pattern of engagement here across all of these photos that correlates with the longer captions. Of course, there are any number of factors that go into whether someone likes or comments on a post - maybe people just generally prefer eggs to sprinkles?- so take all of this with a grain of salt. Though I certainly felt the love from my followers for both of these posts, the lengthy egg sweater post was the clear winner here, with 50 additional likes and 20 extra comments. Two amazing sweaters (shout out to Fashion Brand Company and OkayOk!), two very different caption lengths. (I feel seen again… but not in a good way this time, oops.) Meanwhile, my short-caption beach photo got a few more likes, but just a single comment… which was asking if I was doing some sort of A/B testing. I received a handful of comments in return, and each was very personal and responsive to what I had written - I felt seen! My longer caption was a bit of a personal reflection on the amount of walking I’ve done during the pandemic: I also recommended a particular park, and asked others to share their favorites. My shorter caption received a decent number of likes - but it was radio silence in the comments section.įor my second round of comparisons, I used two landscape-y shots. A bold stance, I know, and one that was rewarded by many supportive comments. cherry blossoms - the photo with the longer caption gathered more comments.Īdditionally, the photo with the longer caption got more likes in two of the three instances.įor my cherry blossom photos, I used my long caption to “clap back” against those who sneer at cherry blossom photos. I let the posts sit in my Insta feed for a couple of weeks for good measure, and then I logged in to Hootsuite Analytics for the grand reveal. Note: All posts were scheduled (using Hootsuite) for around 4 pm PST (11 pm UTC). (And as scientist’s usually disclose in professional experiments: likes from my Mom will not be included in the final tally.) I whipped up my captions, scheduled my posts on Hootsuite to go out over the course of a weekend, and sat back to wait for the likes and comments to roll in. Here’s a breakdown of all the lengths and character count, for those keeping score at home: THEME OF PHOTO I decided the “short” captions would be just a few words: one sentence, no longer than one line. This seems in line with other social media experts’ perception of a “long” caption, so I made sure all of mine were between 90 and 130 words. Any caption where you need to click ‘more’ is also considered long for me,” he told me. One photo in each pair got a short caption, and the other got a long caption.įor the purposes of this experiment, I went with Brayden’s definition of “long”: “I would say any captions with more than three line breaks is considered long in my books. That meant I posted two photos of cherry blossoms, two landscape shots, and two selfies (featuring what you might generously call “statement” sweaters). Each pair of photos contained similar visual content, so I could compare engagement as fairly as possible. To see if long captions garner more likes and comments than short captions, I posted three pairs of thematically themed shots to my personal Instagram account. Instagram’s algorithm is likely to position posts with the most likes and comments near the top of your followers’ feeds, so for the best chance of growing your audience, give your existing audience what they want! Which is… longer captions! Probably! We’re about to find out. Knowing the length of Instagram captions that your audience prefers is crucial for maximizing your reach. “Sometimes all you have is your Instagram caption to grab your audience’s attention and educate them with valuable content,” he adds. This is especially helpful since it’s hard to add links on Instagram. Having longer captions provides your audience with more information around a topic. In his experience, longer captions offer an opportunity to get more creative and add clarity. There is only so much information, copy, and context you can put in an image,” says Brayden. “Overall, I think longer captions provide better engagement on Instagram. I know this because I asked Brayden Cohen, who is on Hootsuite’s social marketing team and manages the Instagram account. There are a lot of people smarter than me who suspect that longer captions get more engagement. Hypothesis: Instagram posts with longer captions get more engagement Bonus: Download a free checklist that reveals the exact steps a fitness influencer used to grow from 0 to 600,000+ followers on Instagram with no budget and no expensive gear.

Instagram caption definition