Writing social media captions can be a bummer sometimes, especially for nonprofits. You want to engage your audience and get them to show their support by liking, sharing, or starting conversations but, with all the options on their news feed, how do you get them to stop scrolling and read your caption?
We’ve got you covered! Here are twelve simple but practical tips for writing appealing social media captions that communicate your nonprofit’s messages and motivate your audience to act.
1. Check spelling and grammar. Running your caption through a tool like Grammarly before publishing or scheduling your post will help you prevent hard-to-see mistakes.
2. Keep your captions short, simple, and right to the point. Do not make your audience click “Read more” to read the complete message. They most likely won’t.
3. Reflect your brand personality in all communications.
4. Know your audience, use a voice that is appropriate for them, and be consistent with it.
5. Think of the purpose of the post and write the caption with intention.
6. Remember that the most important stuff goes first. Use the first sentence to highlight important information and grab your reader’s attention. They should immediately know the context of the post and your intentions of it. But stay away from click-baiting!
7. Boost engagement. Create captions that encourage conversations, and make your audience respond. Asking a question is one of the most used and straightforward caption-writing strategies on social media. Open-ended questions create more conversation than “yes” or “no” questions, so take advantage.
8. Include call-to-actions, but not on every single caption. Asking for people to do something too often could make your audience unfollow you.
9. Add value. Give your audience something, whether it is information, inspiration, or resources.
10. Tag other pages mentioned in your post caption or content. Tagging and engaging with other social media pages will encourage them to do the same with you, and consequently, increase your reach.
11. Use Hashtags! They are great for connecting users around a particular subject and can increase organic reach when done correctly. Ensure that your hashtags are general yet relevant to your post, and remember that too many hashtags can look spammy.
12. Spice up your captions with emojis! Emojis are very useful and can help you quickly grab your audience’s attention. There are many ways to use them to give your captions some personality: at the beginning, at the end, or as bullet points, for example. Just use those that are relevant to your message and do not overuse them.
Start by putting these tips into practice and keep an eye on the engagement metrics to learn what is working and what doesn’t. Then adjust and test again! You will soon learn how to resonate with your audience and get them to act. It is a matter of practice, time, and testing!
If you found these useful, add this link to your bookmarks. We will be updating this article to meet the most recent best practices!
This is an article by Alba Lopez, Social Media Specialist at C(GROUP.
