What should publishers know about the effects of call-to-action verbs on their Instagram engagement?
Picture this: you’ve worked in the regional book-publishing industry for years. Now, to your horror, you realize that to keep up with today’s increasingly technology-centered world, your press’s book marketing plan needs to include social media advertising. Sound familiar?
Your frantic Google search yields general best practices for book advertising on Instagram.
Andrew McCarthy’s website teaches that calls to action (CTAs) can be used in posts to get followers to act. He claims that effective CTAs use “powerful, clear, instructive verbs.”
On plannthat.com, you find examples of these verbs:
- buy now,
- click on, and
- subscribe to.
These websites say that if you take their advice, your followers will engage with your posts more often.
But this recommendation is directed towards all businesses. Naturally, you want to know if
using action verbs in CTAs will improve engagement with local publishers’ Instagram posts.
Luckily, I’ve done some research to answer this question for you.
I collected data from three regional book publishers in Utah Valley: Future House Publishing, Torrey House Press, and Shadow Mountain Publishing. From each publisher’s Instagram account, I randomly selected ten photo (not video) posts. Then, for each of the 30 posts, I identified three things:
- whether the CTA included an action verb,
- if so, what that verb was, and
- how much engagement it received (likes plus comments).
The average engagement was 27.3 for posts without action verbs in their CTA and 28.6 for posts with action verbs. The difference between these averages is not statistically significant. In fact, the p-value for the t-test I ran was 0.82, meaning it is likely that the difference between the average engagement of posts with and without action verbs in their CTA is due to chance, not because action verbs increase engagement.
And even when I calculated the average engagement for posts with and without action verbs separately for each publisher, and ran t-tests to determine the relationship between each publisher’s averages, all three p-values were greater than 0.05—that is, not statistically significant.
This means that posts with action verbs did not receive significantly more engagement than posts without action verbs. These findings suggest that for local publishers, including action verbs in Instagram CTAs may not significantly increase engagement.
So what does this mean for your book marketing plan?
First, don’t focus on using action verbs in every post. Instead, explore other ways to improve engagement on Instagram. (For example, experiment with the length of your posts.)
Second, pick a few ideas for improvement, implement them regularly, and monitor the results.
Social media growth is a gradual process, so don’t be discouraged if it takes time to notice a difference.