Crafting attention-grabbing captions is always difficult, especially when you're creating Instagram captions for graphic design.
What’s the best way to get your work seen by the most people? Should you fill the caption with hashtags, or leave them out altogether? How about emojis—or are those tacky? Should you give the piece’s name and dimensions, or just point the viewer to your linkin.bio?
There’s not much advice available for this question, especially in the graphic design field. Most articles about Instagram captions for graphic design only list caption ideas or common types of captions, without providing guidance on what type of caption to use and when.
In order to remedy this knowledge gap, this article researches what type of Instagram caption results in the most viewer interaction for graphic designers.
Methodology
I trawled through Instagram portfolios of self-described graphic designers and selected those who specialized in print design and had over 100,000 followers. Once I had fifteen designers who fit these criteria, I collected their six most recent posts (as of October 2022) which featured original graphic design. I numbered the posts and randomly selected thirty posts.
I collected the Instagram captions from these posts and unitized them into chunks based on what text content they included. This often followed traditional sentence structuring, but also included unitizing such Instagram-specific content as usernames, hashtags, and emojis. Full unitization resulted in 79 distinct pieces of data.
To properly analyze the data, I created this codebook:
An independent coder and I coded 30 pieces of data, adjusted the codebook (to the one seen above), and re-coded the data. At this point we reached a 0.869 Cohen’s Coefficient, which marks the codebook as highly reliable. Using the improved codebook, I coded the remaining data. After coding the data, I analyzed it according to the amount of engagement each post received.
Data
At surface level, it’s clear that the most prevalent type of Instagram captions for graphic design—among the best-performing data pieces—is non-informative text: plain text that doesn’t contain client-relevant information about the graphic design piece.
However, simply being the most common type of Instagram captions for graphic design posts doesn’t mean that non-informative text is the best type of caption for graphic designers to use.
Due to the nature of the Instagram algorithm, posts rarely reach all followers in a manner that allows for timely and useful interactions (likes and comments). As such, no post received the “like” interaction from more than 4% of any account’s total followers. (Comments were so few as to be negligible at a percentage level.) The analyzed posts were liked by 0.11% to 3.31% of an account’s total followers. My analysis thus occurs within this small boundary.
To have graphic design Instagram posts be seen and interacted with by more people, we want to target types of text used in high-visibility graphic design posts. I’ve broken down the types of text used in most-liked graphic design posts:
While some numbers repeat, each row on the table represents an individual post. Among these eleven top-performing posts, we then see that a majority of five utilize informative text.
Analysis
It’s clear that the Instagram captions for graphic design type that result in the most user interaction is informative text: text that provides hard information about the featured design. This text includes information such as graphic design medium, availability for purchase, pricing, and other design-related factoids.
Of course, a majority of this text type doesn’t mean that every Instagram caption should be informative text alone. Almost every analyzed caption utilizes multiple types of text; indeed, only two captions out of 79 limit themselves to one text type. I therefore assume—with further study needed—that using multiple text types in Instagram captions for graphic design is beneficial. Users who are not engaged by mere informative text may—as among the other top-performing text types— be engaged by usernames, hashtags, or non-informative text.
Conclusion
Don’t ignore the wide variety of text types available to use in Instagram captions for graphic design marketing. On social media, when something is overused it grows stale and interest lessens; therefore, avoid using the exact same text types and formatting for every caption. But bear in mind the top-performing text type when crafting your graphic design Instagram posts: informative text.