Instagram without likes: photos and text remain. Which of them is more important?

The experiment with canceling likes, started by Instagram in the USA and Canada, gradually covered almost the whole world. And now users are faced with the question of revising values — what, if not the number of likes, will attract attention to the post? There remains the picture itself and the caption under it, which now, most likely, will be read more often and more carefully than before. How important is the text under the Instagram post today?

The enormous experience accumulated in just a few years suggests that a successful signature under a photo on Instagram can be very different. Serious or playful, laconic or stretched, pretentious or self—deprecating - it all depends on its relevance and circumstances.

Some resort to crude but effective tricks. Many people remember the comic account of an ordinary chicken egg, where under the photo there was a provocative caption "Let's all set a world record together and make this post the most laicanized." And it worked!

Does anyone now have doubts after this that a small piece of text under the photo plays an important role? With the cancellation of the likes display, when only the account owner can see the true popularity of a particular post, the text will become an even more important element of the publication, and sometimes the main one.

We have already written about the reason for the cancellation of likes — this experiment is designed to reduce the competition, often unnecessarily emotional, between users of the social network. This, according to the owners of Instagram, will have a beneficial effect on the mental state of users.

To the complaints of a number of celebrities and popular bloggers, the social network office responds that everything will be fine, just the emphasis in the publication shifts from likes to the text under the photo and, of course, to comments on it. Now the text will carry an additional load, but few have understood what its power is.

Most of these collections are designed for novice bloggers who are taking their first steps on Instagram and have neither experience nor inspiration. But for a serious influencer, a signature is not just a funny phrase, richly flavored with emojis, but an important tool that can make a social network user like a post.

A traveling photographer from Mumbai Siddthartha Joshi says about the captions to his pictures like this:

In the case of Joshi, signatures give the post a special weight, documentary. They make people pay more attention to photography and think about serious things. In other cases, the approach and goal may be different, but the effect for the blogger will be similar — positive.

Studies have shown that publications with captions attract a larger audience than just photos. The same effect is given by the inscriptions made on the picture itself. The international marketing company Socialbakers analyzed several thousand Instagram accounts and determined that publications with text collect on average 41% more likes than just images.

One of the most important tasks of the signature is to create a closer contact with the audience. It is thanks to this that the text in Instagram has gradually evolved from the level of a service element, to a "mega signature" — a meaningful, deeply personal message that many users use today, for example, Taylor Swift.