Use market research to find the catchiest kickers that will engage your audience.
Writing a caption for social media posts can be one of the most frustrating parts of social media marketing. Is it the right length? Is it catchy enough? Does it have enough elements to reach people organically?
Caption writing is especially important on Instagram, where most of the text gets cut off. Social media marketers such as Elise Darma and Grace Carter recommend starting your Instagram captions with a short, creative, trendy hook that will encourage viewers to read the full caption.
These types of caption hooks are also known as “kickers.” Kickers for social media captions may include trending slang, hashtags, emojis, questions, pop culture references, and more.
To see if this practice does, in fact, lead to higher engagement rates in the book publishing industry, I analyzed 50 posts with and without kickers from five of the top publishers in the US:
1. Hachette Books
2. HarperCollins
3. MacMillan
4. Penguin Random House
5. Simon & Schuster.
To perform this content analysis, I looked at the Instagram post captions of 10 posts from each of the publishers. 5 posts from each publisher had caption hooks, and 5 did not. Whether a post was considered to have a caption hook/kicker was determined through the previously-mentioned criteria. I then noted the engagement for each post. I found that the average engagement (likes plus comments) for these posts without kickers was 791.5, while posts with kickers averaged 986.7.
These findings show that Instagram posts with kickers generally receive significantly more engagement, so they are a best practice to implement. Book marketers can use this strategy to optimize their captions by following trends in the industry to see what short phrases will grasp viewers’ attention.
If you want to up your Instagram-caption-writing game, do some market research to see what’s trending and explore creative ways to implement that into the beginning of your captions.