Your goals for your Instagram account? They don’t really matter.
Whether you’re a business owner promoting your products or services on Insta, a wannabe influencer, a big-time authority, or just a “regular old” Instagram user set on keeping your army of followers engaged, you need winning captions to get it right.
Truly attention-grabbing captions that magnetize your IG followers and leave them itching to engage with you in the comments can boost your engagement rate to the tune of 80 to 150 percent.
It’s not just what you write that counts, though. It’s also how you format your Instagram captions. Because the deal here? Nobody likes intimidating walls of text that scream, “Whoah, that’s a lot of words right there,” and not much else.
Formatting Instagram captions correctly can make all the difference if you want to make sure that everyone who comes across your awesome posts actually reads your captions — especially if you’re promoting your business, but even if you’re not.
So, what do you need to know to turn your captions into super-readable eye candy that your followers won’t say no to? Here goes!
First Things First: How Long Should Your Instagram Captions Be?
Instagram has an extremely generous caption length limit of 2,200 characters — which, as we’ve tested out, usually translates to roughly 300 words. You can do a lot with that space, but should you?
Social media surveys and research tend to lead to mixed results, but one common number you’ll see is this. Instagram captions between 140 and 220 characters usually have higher engagement rates than much longer captions. Another relevant point? Your captions get truncated after 125 characters, which means your Insta audience will have to tap the More button to keep reading.
Stick to these shorter captions, and learning how to format Instagram captions instantly becomes less relevant. You won’t need line breaks or bold text to keep your followers “on task” if your captions have no more than one to three shorter sentences. Engaging messages and a few cool emojis almost always suffice in this case.
Those shorter captions might be associated with better engagement rates on Instagram, but they simply won’t cut it if you’re promoting something — whether that’s your business, your growing Instagram influencer-dom, or even just that awesome travel destination you just returned from.
Longer Instagram captions can work. You can keep your followers on the edge of their seat until the very end, gobbling up every word. After all, around 78 percent of Instagram users actively look for new brands on the platform, too. But you need formatting to make it happen.
Emojis, line breaks, bullet points, and bold text can all create nice little visual breaks that tell your audience you’re professional about your Instagram account. Do it well, and they won’t even realize they’re reading super wordy captions.
Formatting Instagram Captions to Add Line Breaks and Spacing
Adding line breaks and spaces to your Instagram captions used to be a real pain, but it’s become a lot easier since the 2020 update. Most users won’t have any issues with adding spacing and line breaks to their captions simply by hitting the enter key — just like you would when writing something in Word, Google Documents, or an email.
If, for some reason, it’s not working for you, give these troubleshooting tips a go:
- On mobile? Make sure your Instagram app is up to date. Try the old “turn it off and on again” method if something goes awry after an update. It’ll usually work.
- On Android, make sure to hit the enter key right after the last character on the line you’ve just finished with, so without using the space bar first.
- Some iOS users report having to hit the return key up to five times before a line break is successfully created. We have no idea what’s up with that, but trying can’t hurt, right?
Still struggling with formatting Instagram captions? Try setting the whole caption up somewhere else. Word, Google Docs, and Evernote are all popular candidates. Once your caption is all done, copy and paste it into Instagram. Most of the time, you’ll see that your initial formatting is preserved perfectly. Now, you just need to add some emojis.
How to Use Emojis as Formatting Tools for Extra Instagram Engagement
Emojis are basically Instagram’s love language. They’re also little visual markers that tell everyone who stumbles on your captions to keep reading. It’s no wonder, when you think about it, that adding emojis in a strategic, carefully planned way can boost your engagement rate by about 17 percent all on its own.
We bet you’ve never thought of emojis as part of your formatting process, though. Right? Well, they can be!
You can use emojis to:
- Create bullet lists — where, instead of boring old dots, you use cool and relevant emojis in front of each bullet point. Bullet lists are especially powerful for entrepreneurs and influencers promoting their businesses. Good emoji choices include ✔️, 🎯, 💪, and ☕️, although that heavily depends on your style and what you’re promoting.
- Shorten your Instagram captions! Every emoji counts as one character. Even a short word like “map” leads to “character savings” if you replace it with 🗺️. Plus, replacing important words in your captions with cool emojis makes your message infinitely more fun to read. Imagine how much more you can do with captions like “Heading to the 🛫 to start my 🇦🇺 trip!”
- Add visual interest to a paragraph. An emoji or two on both ends, or a couple at the end, can break up longer captions.
Don’t go all-out, though. Effective Instagram captions have a few well-placed emojis, spaced out more or less evenly. Make it an entire bonanza, and you risk tacky, cheap-looking captions. (Oh, and while this is a given, we might as well add that the emojis you pick should be 100 percent relevant to your posts and captions, too!)
How to Format Instagram Captions With Bold & Italic Text
Instagram doesn’t natively support bold and italic text in your feed or bio captions. That doesn’t mean you can’t find a way around it. A quick Google search will immediately turn up a whole bunch of third-party sites “fancy text generators” that allow you to add bold and italic text as well as change the font on your Instagram captions. The same story applies to the Google Play Store and iOS App Store.
Before you go this route, keep in mind that Instagram works the way it does for a reason. The default font (Instagram Sans) perfectly matches Insta’s overall look and brand identity. It “supports” your photos and videos without being obtrusive, and using special tools to bypass the default can make you stand out in a bad way sometimes.
Using all capital letters where you would otherwise have chosen bold or italic text is almost always a perfectly good choice. See how that looks before you grab a third-party app that may or may not be a tad sus.
Formatting Instagram Captions to Add Bullet Points
If you’re in the process of learning how to format Instagram captions to get more likes, views, and comments on Insta, you’ll want to know what your options are for bullet points sooner or later.
Most marketers simply rely on relevant emojis to simulate bullet lists. This formatting technique kills two birds with one stone, because emojis create a cool visual focal point while also working with the tools you have by default.
In combination with line breaks for better readability, you really don’t need anything else.
On the off chance that you hate the idea of using emojis as bullet points with a vengeance, you do have one other option — using the symbols already on your keyboard, instead. Hyphens (-) and asterisks (*) are the most common choices in this case. You’ve been warned, though — they can make you look dated and unprofessional.
Now That You Know How to Format Instagram Captions, What’s Next?
Formatting Instagram captions can go a very long way toward boosting your engagement rate and creating posts that convert — but your formatting choices are only as powerful as the actual content of your IG captions!
If you’re writing business captions, and even if you’re just a normal Instagram user, we’d like to leave you with these final tips. Just to, you know, make sure your formatting efforts truly pay off:
- Resist the temptation to build up suspense by being vague at the start of your captions. Your first 125 characters serve to get your audience to tap that More button. That leaves you with two options. Either lead with hypnotizing clickbait (“You’ll never guess what we just did!”) or stick to a matter of fact “what it says on the tin” lede. (“We’re launching in two days. Will you be there?”) Really make your hook work for you.
- Make every single word count. Go over your caption again after writing it and check if there’s any place where you can shorten it. “Buy” is usually better than “purchase,” but the extra words you get with “grab yours now” can be worth it for engagement reasons.
- It’s Instagram. Make your caption Insta-worthy. Your audience needs you to be just a little bit witty and engaging, even if you’re a very serious business that sells, for example, insurance.
- Business user? Every caption needs some sort of call to action. Even if it’s an “engagement” post rather than a “conversion” post. That call to action doesn’t have to be blatant and in your face, but it should exist. A quick “Which one screams out to you?” or “That discount is all yours — but hurry!” can suffice.
Killer captions + awesome, ultra-readable formatting = maximum engagement. Keep working that magic, and your follower count will snowball!
