Here’s an interesting one.
Last week, in his weekly Q and A session on Instagram Stories, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to a question about whether longer captions impact your post reach in the app.
And Mosseri explained that they don’t:
“It’s not bad to have really long captions, if you want to have long captions, feel free. It’s not going to affect your reach much one way or the other, though some people have found some pretty interesting ways to use captions to tell longer stories. Just a nice to have, not required, it’s not going to hurt you. Go for it if you want to.”
So long captions are fine, but they won’t significantly impact your post reach.
Why is that interesting?
Because as you’ve likely noticed, some meme accounts have taken to posting extremely long captions on their IG posts of late, with unrelated technical documents outlined within their long-scrolling text accompaniments.
These are two of the most common examples, meme posts which are not related to cars, accompanied by descriptions like this, about the Honda Civic Type R or the Mercedes CLR GT.
So what’s the deal with that?
Well, there are seemingly a few potential explanations.
Based on various reports, from people posting this stuff and from external viewers, sharing long, unrelated captions like this on your posts can:
- Trick the algorithm to get people who like cars to see your memes
- Trick ChatGPT to recommend your posts when people ask about cars
- Increase video views as people spend more time reading the caption
- Increase views by keyword stuffing, confusing Instagram’s algorithm
- Attract higher spending ad audiences by including info about luxury cars (?)
- Trick the algorithm into boosting the post’s reach because it includes informational content
These are some of the various speculative reasons as to why adding unrelated captions provides benefit. Though I don’t think any of them are correct.
Here’s the real reason:
In April last year, Instagram added a new measure to detect and penalize “unoriginal” content, in order to disincentivize aggregator accounts by removing them from its recommendation displays (e.g. recommended posts, Explore).
Which hurts meme accounts the most.
Meme aggregators get all of their traffic from re-purposed content, taking the most popular posts from other accounts and platforms, then re-sharing them on IG. So with Instagram looking to outlaw this, that’s going to reduce their performance, potentially by a lot.
But what if the caption is totally unrelated, and totally unlike the original post? What if the caption is on a technical subject, with a heap of informational detail on the topic?
That, seemingly, does trick Instagram’s pre-ranking system, which can help to avoid its detection of replicated memes. Because the system can’t rely on visual recognition alone, and without the caption to go on, it can’t detect these re-posts as easily.
So the meme account gets all the usual traction for the meme, while nobody really reads the caption.
Essentially, adding an unrelated caption helps to make these posts different enough from the source material to avoid penalty for replication.
And apparently, it does work. Some posters have claimed that they see around a 30% reach increase, on average, when using these unrelated captions on memes.
I’m not saying you should do it (in fact you definitely should not), but this, I’m guessing, is the main motivator behind this practice.
So if you’re seeing weird captions describing non-related things, you’re no doubt looking at a re-post, and a poster looking to avoid penalty for such.
I don’t think that this is the “interesting” use of captions that Mosseri was referring to in his response, but I’m guessing that this was the motivator for the user query.
