(Update on November 14, 2021 at 9:00AM PT: This blog post was published in 2019. For up-to-date information about reaching your audience on Instagram, learn more about ads on Instagram.)

An engaging caption can inspire your community to act, tell a compelling story or help you connect with your community. Read this guide on how you can write engaging captions for both your feed posts and stories.

An engaging caption can inspire your followers to interact with your photos and videos or to purchase your products or services. Here are 5 tips that will help you write captions that inspire people:

Use captions to tell the story of your business, like how your business was founded or how your products or services were developed. You can even have a story arc with a beginning, middle, and end.

Ask questions.

Your followers can leave their answers in the post’s comments, or even message you directly to learn more.

Keep it short and sweet.

Write a brief caption to catch people’s attention right away. Place important announcements and messages at the very beginning of your caption. If it is longer than 125 characters, they will have to tap ‘more’ to read the whole post.

The tone of your captions should consistently reflect your brand. For instance, if your business has a silly, light-hearted personality, include emojis to make your captions more fun.

Encourage your followers to take action.

Be direct if you want to encourage your followers to act. For instance, you can say, “Buy Now” if you’re featuring a product you’d like your customers to purchase.

Add text to your stories to communicate and interact with your community.

If you have never shared photos or videos to your story, learn how to do it here.

Try these 5 creative tips:

Experiment with different colors, sizes, alignments and fonts. Don’t forget to use color blocking to make your text stand out.

Sometimes a photo or a video just won’t capture what you’re trying to share. Maybe you have a personal story or poem or another piece of content that you’d prefer people read. When you open stories, use Type Mode in Create to share stories with no photo or video required.

Make time-sensitive announcements.

Use text to announce a time-sensitive promotion or offer a time-sensitive discount code. Since your stories disappear in 24 hours, announcing it on your stories will create a sense of urgency and inspire people to act immediately.

Add text that moves along to your videos.

After adding text in your videos, tap and hold the text until the pinning tool appears. Use the slider bar at the bottom of the screen to scroll through the video to find where you want to pin the text. This way, you can pin floating text in your videos and share a message with your followers in a delightful way.

Share tips and tutorials.

Provide more information about your products and services by adding text with step-by-step tutorials on how to use your products.