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Caption - Instagram Glossary

The caption is the text accompanying an Instagram post, up to 2,200 characters. Instagram truncates it at roughly 125 characters behind a 'more' link, so the first line functions as the entire caption for the majority of viewers who never expand it.

Captions do two jobs that pull in different directions. They persuade the reader, and they tell Instagram's search and recommendation systems what the post is about. Writing purely for the reader loses you the classification signal; writing purely for keywords produces text nobody finishes.

The practical resolution is to put the persuasion in line one and the context underneath. Line one earns the expand; the body carries the detail, the keyword and the call to action. Hashtags go last or in the first comment - the difference in reach between the two is not measurable, but the difference in how the caption reads is.

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