Transcripts
1. Intro: Captions are becoming more important on Instagram in 2018. Getting poems, and quotes from Pinterest does not seem to be as effective as it once was. Meme accounts have been among the fastest, growing on Instagram. Home to funny images, short videos, and cultural relevant captions. I started changing my captions a few months ago, and I was amazed at how many people tag friends. It's so much fun to see people have inside jokes going on in my comment section. In this class, I will show you how I find inspiration for my captions, and a trick that I have never shared before on how I get helped to make witty comments and use these for my Instagram captions.
2. About me: I'm going to use myself as an example because I have an high engagement rate and I want to show you guys how I do that. First of all, this is a website called tribal, where I pulled this off. It's a website where you can put your own handling. So your username, so mine's Full Metal Needle, and there you can see your average engagement rate and it goes by the last 10 posts. You can see here that I have an average likes of 502 and the average comments are 10, and that's a high engagement rate. As you can see here, it shows you what it means. But as you see, I'm not someone who posts very a lot. The last six months, I really tried to make an effort in my captions to see if that makes a difference, and it made a huge difference and that I'm going to show you how I did it.
3. The don'ts : First of all, I want to talk over some points that are being made in blogs and articles about Instagram, what you have to do, what you don't have to do. A lot of these rules apply for big businesses who have a social media manager, who have all the time in the world because it's their job, they get paid to do it. My first point is especially the one I'm referring to about posting every day. If you are big business and you have great content, then you can post every day. That is something you can do, and I think posting every day is the best for Instagram, for the algorithm, and for engagement. Not everyday at the same time, at different times, that would be ideally the best. But the problem is that if you're like me, you're just one person. The chances that you're going to have great content every day is very small. My advice is if you're just one person, focus those three or four days on really good content with a great caption and good editing and all those things. The rest of the time on Instagram, focus on liking other people and giving them comments, so you can also work on your engagements in a different way. The question I see all the time on Instagram is, what are you up to this weekend or what are you going to do tonight? I don't think it works because it's very generic, you don't feel connected to that person because it's such a normal question. I think if you want to be engaging with your audience, then you have to show a bit more character and be more creative with your questions. To me, it seems like they're not really interested in what I'm going to do this weekend. It seems like they're interested in asking me questions for engagement, but it doesn't feel personal at all.
4. Trending topics: I want to show you some examples of my own captions that I used that got a lot of engagement and that has a clear indication of why it had so much engagement. The first one I want to show you is talking about something that is trending in a way that connects with you. There's always something happening in the world that is really trending, is really happening, politics or something in pop culture. You can always make it in a way that it really connects with you. I'm going to show you an example from my own feed how I did that.
5. Example: Three of the posts that did really well on engagement. You can see I used a trending topic as politics and podcasts, because podcasts are getting bigger and bigger, and people like to talk about it. People like to share the podcast that they like and talk about an episode, what they like. It is really popular right now. What I use is also my own situation to make it personal. People like it when it's personal, that is, in reference to me, so then they can respond in a reference to them. Here I have stitching while listening to my favorite podcast with the hashtag podsaveamerica. I now have the situation where I have absolutely no idea what is happening in my own country, but follow every move that is happening in American politics. I have the podcast that people can talk to in reference, I have my own country that I'm not American, that I'm Dutch, and I touch a little bit of the subjects about politics and what's happening. If you look at the comments then, people on Instagram are always very polite. Well, in the embroidery community they are. Also, it's a small community, so we know each other. Here you can see that it's always very polite. People will always first respond like, "This is so amazing," or "I love this." But you can see that they are also talking about the news. I got responses about, stay away from American news, insanity. Someone from the UK, "This is stunning, I feel the same way. I don't know what's happening in the UK." Then I try to be also very ready with my responses. I would say UK when I was like, but the UK is also my obsession with Brexit, and that the Netherlands is not that interesting compared to the UK or the US. Then someone also is responding to the first person who was talking about Brexit. You get a chain reaction. People also like to share the podcast they like. I have three subjects that people can engage with.
6. How to use a quote in the right way: Another example is share what you were doing and engage people in a fun way. I think if you're an artist, you can especially relate to this, that sometimes you have a project that just takes a long time or you have a project that you don't really feel anymore and you just don't want to do it. The reason for this can be, "Oh, I'm not feeling it anymore. I don't like it anymore or I'm too busy" I have a lot of those that I'm just too busy. I had to work a lot. I spent my days napping and I didn't do anything or also I'm making this course and I'm busy with this, but is that something that people want to hear? I don't think that it's not really engaging if I say, "Well, here's another pic, we didn't do much because I was busy with Skillshare." It's not really content. It's not a caption that people feel related to, they can engage with. Fine. You're busy on Skillshare, whatever. I'm going to show you what I did to make it engaging in a fun way.
7. Example: The backstory of this post was that I was keep changing my mind on the pattern if it had to be a bun or had to be a braid. I was thinking in my head, something is funny about rules. You have the pattern and I keep changing it up. There should be a rule for that to not do that or something. Then I thought about the movie, Fight Club, and the movie Fight Club has this really famous quote. What I did with the quote from Fight Club is I changed all the words, Fight Club with embroidery. What you get is the first rule of embroidery pattern is, you do not talk about a pattern and then change your mind endlessly. The second rule of embroidery pattern is you do not talk about a pattern and then change your mind endlessly. Third rule of embroidery pattern, if someone yells stop, goes limp or taps out, the embroidery is over. Fourth rule, chicks can bitch when they stitch. I changed more than just Fight Club. I wanted people to know that it was from Fight Club. The third rule, if someone yells stop, goes limp or taps out, I kept that in so people will know it's really from Fight Club that they get the reference. I posted it and then look at our comments. Here here see how well it did. You see that someone tagged someone, "Chicks can bitch when they stitch," "This caption gives me life, oh, my god," "Absolutely love it, must bitch after stabbing myself multiple times." I thought that was a really good one. Here's another one where I used a quote, but I didn't change anything from the quote because if it's so perfect with my post, I use a quote from Bob Ross because the video is me painting something and my feed obviously is about embroidery and not painting. Because people like to point out that they understand it, that they understand the reference, and we all love the happy little accidents. Maybe our role lives a happy little tree over there. When you look at the comments, then you see that people like to point out that they get the reference like, oh, go Bob, and someone says, "Oh, happy little accidents love," "I love Bob." People like to point it out.
8. My secret tip: I can show you many more examples of captions that I make that worked really well. I will put some pictures up in the projects sections that you can look at. The question is, how do I come up with all these puns or quotes? The answer is, I don't always make them up myself. I have a little hack that I use and I'm going to show you what I do. I'm first going to tell you which site it is and the site is Imgur. What I do is I post my picture on Imgur. Imgur is a file and photo-sharing website, so you can post your pictures there, your memes, everything and then people can comment on it and it gets upvoted. Especially Imgur, it's all about the comments. You post something and the person who has the most funny comment gets upvoted, so they get points. What I do is I post my picture and people react to it and they come up with so creative stuff and I steal it for my Instagram. I'm going to show you one of them that worked also really well. I can show you many more examples of captions that I made.
9. How to: This is Imgur, this is the side you can put in tags, you see there at the top tags, staff picks, gaming memes. On the top, you can also put your own tags in. I'm going to put a tag in embroidery. There's not that many embroidery posts. I think they're like 620. It's not that much if you think about how big this side is. Let me see then. I don't know, like 40 or maybe for me, probably. Here I see one that's mine. Click on it, and here you have my profile. Let's go to my profile, and there you have it. This is one of my Skillshare classes. They're all part of my Skillshare classes. The top ones click on the one that I used as an example. This is also a Skillshare class. It's hello, it's a trek painting technique. Now if you look at the comments, the one that was the highest is, "Are you looking for help? Is this an SOS?" I found that's pretty witty. I liked that, so I used it for my Instagram posts. Here you see my Instagram posts. This is the Instagram caption I made from the Imgur comment. This looks like I'm being kidnapped and sending out cryptic Instagram post for help. It did well, I got a lot of views and I'll look at my comments, they're cute. Someone actually said, "You always have the funniest captions, and I love that." That is a little tip for your own Instagram.
10. Quick overview: Here we have a quick overview of what I showed you and what you can do to get more engagement. Look at sites like Reddit and Imgur for pictures that are related to your posts. Look at the common section for inspiration, you can always find punny comments or funny comments that you can turn into a really good caption. Share things that are relatable with your audience, with embroidery that I do it can be about a needle that I dropped in the couch and the fear of sitting on it, I'm sure that whatever you do, you also have the same challenges in a different way, or that you are a new mom, and you're trying to squeeze in Instagram in that nap that share things that are relatable with your audience. With embroidery, it can be about the needle that I dropped in the couch, what happens. It's a little bit of a freak-out moment because you're afraid you're going to sit on it, somebody else is going to sit on it. This doesn't have to be crafts related, it can also be your Instagram is about an online shop for baby clothes. Then it's also a fun way to talk about funny things that you experience as a mom or being a new mom, that you have a chance to do Instagram while your child naps. Those are relatable and people would like to comment on those posts and share their experience. The last one is use movie quotes and lyrics and change them up so they're related to your content. Try to have fun with wordplay and look at how you can change some words into your content and make it fun.
Floor Giebels, Embroidery Artist
