When you ask someone a question, you are more likely to receive a response—does this work with Instagram captions?
My Research Question
In face-to-face interactions, asking a question typically increases engagement. For example, posing the question, “What’s your favorite color?” is surely more likely to elicit a response than if you never asked a question at all. Although this strategy works in person, does this same strategy apply online to Instagram captions posted by publishing houses?
According to the article titled “How to Write Great Instagram Captions: 9 Tips with Examples,” your content is more likely to be seen on the Instagram algorithm if it has good engagement, and one way to achieve this is through capturing the audience in the form of a question. Creating this sense of dialogue between the user and the company should increase engagement on the post.
Collecting my Data
To test whether questions increase engagement for publishing houses specifically, I gathered points of data from five prominent publishing houses: Simon & Schuster, Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan. I randomly selected numerous Instagram captions from each company, 10 with the presence of a question and 10 without from each publishing company (100 captions in total), and compared engagement in the form of comments. An independent coder and I both categorized my data using the following codebook, resulting in high reliability as evidenced by a Cohen’s kappa of 1.
Based on my research, it seems that the publishing companies have the right idea. Many of their posts did include the presence of a question, such as “What’s on your book list this month?” or “Who else is going to curl up with a book this weekend?” The idea is that a user will be scrolling on their phone, seeing post after post—until they see it: a question. People love talking about themselves, so the presence of a question is sure to catch an eye.
Perfect, they think to themselves, the chance to talk about myself.
Their eyes light up at the chance to put out into the universe their favorite book or their weekend plans. Enter—they submit their comment. Cha-ching—engagement increases.
But what does the data show?
My Findings
Drum roll, please.
I found that using a question in your Instagram caption does, in fact, increase engagement. For the publishing companies, this increased by an average of 40%, and in some cases, the number tripled. In none of my data did the engagement decrease or stay the same for a caption with a question versus a caption without.
The data was very clear.
Questions increase engagement.
Engagement drives business.
Therefore, using questions in Instagram captions has the potential to drive business.
What are you waiting for? Go ask those questions and get those clicks! The more users you draw to interact with your content, the more exposure and success you’ll have!