How Emojis, Videos and Caption Lengths Impact Instagram Post Performance
How Emojis, Videos and Caption Lengths Impact Instagram Post Performance. Social analytics platform Quintly has conducted a new study of Instagram post performance, analyzing more than 34k Instagram business profiles, and 5.4 million posts, which were published between January 1st and June 30th, 2019.
The report provides an up to date perspective of what’s working on Instagram for brands right now – and with Instagram’s algorithm always changing, and experiments like hiding total Like counts in play, the Instagram landscape is shifting fast.
Here’s a look at some of the key findings from the report.
First off, Quintly’s researchers found that, despite the rising popularity of video content, images remain the most popular post type for brands on the platform, by a significant margin.
That’s not overly surprising – its easier to create good-looking still image posts than it is to come up with, and create, good videos. But still, the popularity of image posts over videos – and, as you can see, carousels – means that a lot of businesses are missing significant opportunities on the platform, as Quintly’s further insights show.
Clearly, brands should be looking beyond image posts if they want to maximize their Instagram performance, with even carousels seeing significantly more engagement than images. Worth considering in your 2020 strategy.
Beyond post types, the next key creative element Quintly’s team looked at was captions, and whether caption length correlates with improved post performance.
As per Quintly’s data, the majority of brands use more than 150 characters for each of their post captions, with many using over 300 characters in their updates.
Is that a good move?
Interestingly, for larger profiles (those with between 1 million and 10 million followers), Quintly’s data showed that no caption at all was the best option to spark engagement, but for everyone else, captions of between 1 and 50 characters saw the best response rates.
So shorter captions is better, and many brands are not currently adhering to this.
Quintly also looked at the use of emojis in posts, and whether they can help brands drive engagement. Quintly’s researchers found that the majority of brand profiles are currently not using emojis in their Insta post captions.
