Should Text Be On Instagram Image Posts: Yes or No

Should Text Be On Instagram Image: Social media is a platform that allows people to reach, engage, and nurture with the target audience, irrespective of the location. There are a number of social media platforms that constantly allow their users to post their content.

Some are texts, some are texts + images, some are just images while some allow limited text to be posted with images. The one that suits better is more favored for the users.

These easily accessible platforms constantly makes effort to make their content more powerful, more engaging, and at the same time, more information to their users. 

One such popular platform is Instagram, where knowledge is shared through images and texts as well. This is widely considered as a boon for B2B and B2C markets as it has around 1 billion active users.

Being one of the most practical options for businesses, it clearly shows no sign of slowing down in terms of popularity and usability.

As Instagram is an ‘image + text’ platform, it has been more challenging than other platforms when it comes to catching more user attention. Especially for brand marketers, it has been more challenging to make their content more catchy and engaging. 

Recently, there has been a big discussion on the performance of photos with text-only graphic images. Some suggest those posts that have text-only images outperform on Instagram.

This claim has raised a lot of questions and doubts at the same time as there is no full-proof clarity on the same. Some believe this, some not; it’s just one’s point of view.

So, here in this post, we are going to discuss the same topic and understand the technicalities of texts on Instagram image posts. 

Beginning of Instagram

• Launched by Kevin Systrom in 2010, Instagram is a photo and video-sharing social media application.
• It was launched on Oct. 6, 2010. Initially, it saw up to 25,000 users in one day.
• From the beginning, the main focus of the app was to feature those photographs that were mostly taken from mobile devices.
• Adding text to images was nowhere in the picture at that time.

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Need of text with image

• In just a short span of time, Instagram got popular.
• The B2B and B2C markets slowly started recognizing the benefit of this social media platform.
• They started using Instagram as a marketing tool for their brands, products, and services.
• Generally, a picture was worth a thousand words but soon they realized something was missing. At times, they need to explain their product with the image.
• Later, in order to benefit B2B and B2C niche, the marketing team further looked for other options to make their product more reachable to the end audience that can further convert to potential customers.
• The best way marketers found is by adding text to images for marketing purposes.

Instagram’s text posts

There are many sites that prefer placing text on Instagram images for enhancing and sharing messages but still, there is no full-proof data to approve claims that it will help the performance.

Undoubtedly, maximum social media marketers use visuals in their campaigns but at times you still need to say something and make your post more appealing. 

At that time, additional texts are implemented into images that further make marketing efforts easier. Many started using texts for a better explanation of their products, services, or brands.

Nowadays a new feature- Instagram stories are a popular way to reach out to customers easily. A number of companies and brands just create Instagram stories and do their marketing.

Types of Instagram post

It is a real challenge to catch the attention of users on Instagram, that too only through images and related texts. Research comparing photos v/s text-only graphic images was carried out by Social Media Lab.

The result was quite unexpected as photos excelled in the performance as compared to the text-only images. Along with that, a lot of follow-up queries also came regarding text on Instagram images.

Image-only post

With the image-only post on Instagram, content marketers need to be very much cautious about how a message is delivered to its end users. At times, Instagram algorithms encourage users to spend time on their website or app just with the use of images.

Text-only post

The text-only posts are favorable for marketing and PRs as they deliver the right message to their customers or potential customers and other audience. Just the post can be sprinkled with multiple colors or attractive stickers will do the marketing part.

This is the best approach in order to avoid any kind of risk that can annoy your followers who are a little bit interested in visuals too rather than going to read just text.

[image used as an example]

Image with a text post

Image-with-text posts are a kind of self-explanatory post. With this, the right message is delivered to the audience. Also, those who are looking for similar products or services can even turn out as potential customers and ultimately happy customers as well.

Performance comparison of Instagram images with and without text

Performance of both are evaluated based on three important factors-

• Reach (number of unique Instagram users who came across the post)
• Likes
• Comments

Both types have their own performance benefits. Based on the user engagement, the Instagram images without text have seen more engagement as compared to the posts having texts. There is a slight increase in engagement on the sole image post. On average, it is proven that only image posts outperform those with texts.

Conclusion

With the fast-changing trend on digital platforms, social media platforms have their own performance benefit based on user requirements and engagement.

It is quite obvious that most of the users don’t want to waste their time reading texts on the images, but those who are serious users who want to try out products or services of a particular brand will definitely need more elaborated aspects of the service they want to use.

Currently, image without text is in trend, but who knows, sooner or later image with text would outperform the former ones.