Why do I need a Caption Visibility Indicator?
In recent months I’ve been helping a bunch of clients optimizing their lead generation through Instagram. One of the easiest things that moved the needle for them was paying attention to their call to actions, and the visibility of it. A lot of my clients are unaware that more often than not (on mobile) people don’t see more than the first 30-something characters.
This means that if you don’t pay attention to those first 30 characters, and make sure your CTA is clear within those first characters, you are wasting precious screen real estate!
How do I use it?
1) Make a copy on your own GDrive:
Which is super simple, you can take a copy of the visibility indicator here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18MmfyiWrScv6wnVQtQ1Yv0S0pA8XZw_R-2-TJiMKI4I/copy
2) paste your caption in cell B9
Paste your whole copy (including emoji’s, hashtags,…) inside the cell B9. The validation and feed visibility will take it up immediately.
What does it show?
The visibility Indicator will do 3 validation checks on your caption:
- Total caption length: if you go above 2200 characters, Instagram won’t allow you to post the caption. In that case, the length validation will color red.
- Hashtags found: you can use up to 30 hashtags in the caption, any more and your caption won’t be shown. So the hashtag validation checks to see how many you have in there.
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Mentions found: according to Instagram’s official help documentation, you can only tag 20 people in a single caption. So I do a check for that as well
After the validation, it shows you the estimated caption visibility. I say estimated because there are a lot of things in play that impacts the visibility (e.g. screen width of the device…)
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The minimal mobile length of 30 characters
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The regular mobile length of 60 characters
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The average desktop feed length of 140 characters
I welcome your feedback if you have suggestions on how to further improve this tool. But either way, I hope it helps you all to further improve your Instagram game!
