In his latest weekly Q&A on Instagram Stories, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri responded to a question about whether longer captions impact post reach in the app.
His answer: 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 boost your reach.
Why does this matter?
Because you’ve probably noticed a new trend among meme accounts: posting very long, unrelated captions, sometimes entire paragraphs under otherwise unrelated memes.
There are plenty of theories about why meme pages are doing this:
- To trick the algorithm into showing their memes to unrelated fans
- To get ChatGPT and other AI tools to surface their content
- To boost watch time by making people scroll through long captions
- To keyword-stuff their way into Explore
- To attract higher-value ad audiences with mentions of other products
- Or even to sneak into “informational” content categories in Instagram’s systems
But here’s the more likely explanation.
In April last year, Instagram rolled out new measures to detect and penalize unoriginal content, especially targeting aggregator meme accounts that repost other people’s content without adding much of their own. Those accounts now get reduced visibility in recommendations and Explore.
By adding long, unrelated captions full of “original” text, meme pages are trying to trick Instagram’s detection systems into treating their posts as unique, and therefore, keep them circulating in recommendations.
But the bottom line, according to Mosseri is that long captions themselves won’t help your reach. So focus on the visual, and take it easy on the caption.