How To Optimize Your Social Media Caption To Generate More Engagement :) #Captionize #SocialMedia
(A2023-114288)

AUTHORS

Thomas Reichstein, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg; Ines Brusch, BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg; Florian Dost, Brandenburg University of Technology; Michael Brusch, Anhalt University of Applied Science

ABSTRACT

Maximizing engagement is an important issue for social media managers. Science has already provided guidance on how to make content more engaging. However, one easy-to-edit part of the social media post has received little attention: The caption. We show that the caption has an underestimated impact on engagement and we specifically address text length. The relationship between text length and engagement is not linear as described in previous literature but follows an inverted U-shape. Using field data, we estimate the optimal length of captions and provide surprising results. We show that captions are mostly too short instead of too long and that an optimal length can increase the engagement rate by up to 17%.