Have you hit the Instagram caption character limit?

Character limit? There's a character limit??

Yep! On Instagram you have 2,200 characters to tell your audience something entertaining, inspirational, educational, and actionable. FYI: Characters include spaces and punctuation.

Reels are shown more to non-followers while posts, carousels, and stories are shown more to followers.

Adding short text to a Reel will attract non-followers who are scrolling or watching stories. But including more info in the caption [ more details below ] can help spur them to action like commenting, sharing, or hopefully following.

On photo posts, you’re speaking to people who already know something about you. A blog post-sized caption can build the trust and connection needed for them to take action like sending you a DM, joining your email list, buying, or booking a service.

Comments, saves, poll interactions, and shares all tell the algorithm your post is valuable, which helps increase how many followers and non-followers will see it. Plus, like this post, it’s easy to turn a blog into a caption or turn an Instagram caption into a blog, email, podcast, etc.

NOTE: If a long caption keeps you from posting, skip it. Do what you can be consistent with first. If that’s 3-word captions, then it’s 3-word captions until you feel like writing more.

Take a minute to look back through your most popular IG posts:

You need a business account to see analytics, it’s free!

How you could have expanded what you shared to create a deeper connection with your audience or give them an action to take.

Share:

➜ something they can easily do or try

➜ a personal or customer / client experience

➜ where you get your tools or resources

➜ content from a related blog post, email, etc that you’ve previously shared

You don't have to blast through all 2.2k characters every time, but test it on a few posts and see how your audience reacts vs short captions.

Let me know if it helps!

Sarah Morgan

Your new no-bullshit business bff, with over 30 years of experience creating and selling online. Follow me @daretogrow.co on Instagram!

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