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Short form vs long form captions which actually gets more reach? I ran a test for 2 months and got mixed results
So I've been trying to figure out if algorithms prefer short punchy captions or long story style ones. For my last 60 posts on instagram I alternated between under 50 word captions and over 200 word ones. The long ones got way more saves but the short ones got more likes. No clear winner on reach though. Has anyone else messed around with this? What worked for you?
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nguyen.tara15d ago
wait did you check if the time you posted them was different? like maybe the long ones hit when more people were scrolling at night vs morning
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hannahk1914d ago
That's actually a really good point, @nguyen.tara, but I think the timing wasn't the issue here. I checked and both the short and long posts went up at the same hour over a few days, so it wasn't a case of one catching the night crowd versus the morning one. The weird part was that the algorithm treated them totally different even when posted back to back. It's like the system decided one was "good content" and the other wasn't, with no warning. I've seen this happen before with my own posts where a 200-word piece gets way more reach than a 1000-word one, and the only difference was the length itself. So I'm leaning more towards the idea that shorter just works better on this platform, even if you'd think the opposite would be true.
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