Captions That Sound Like a Person

Here is a caption that appears, in some form, on thousands of small business accounts every day.

“At [business name], we pride ourselves on delivering exceptional quality and outstanding customer service. Our dedicated team goes above and beyond to ensure every client is completely satisfied. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you!”

Nobody talks like that. Nobody has ever talked like that. And the person who wrote it does not talk like that either, which is the strange part. They are perfectly capable of describing their work in plain language, and then they open the posting app and something happens.

What happens when the app opens

There is a specific transformation that occurs and it is worth naming, because you cannot fix it until you can see it.

Somebody who would happily tell you “yeah, that one was a nightmare, the previous guy had run the pipe through a joist” writes “Another successful project completed! Our expert team tackled this challenging job with professionalism.”

The interesting information got removed. The specific detail, the mild complaint, the actual story. What replaced it is a set of claims that cannot be checked and that every competitor makes identically.

I think this happens for two reasons. The first is that people are imitating what they have seen other businesses do, and other businesses were imitating the same thing, so the register propagates without anyone choosing it. The second is that writing publicly feels formal, and formality in most people’s hands means removing personality and specificity, which are precisely the two things that make writing worth reading.

Why the corporate voice fails

It is unverifiable. “Exceptional quality” is a claim with no evidence attached. A reader cannot evaluate it, so they discount it entirely. Everybody claims this. It carries no information.

It is identical to your competitors. Read three businesses in your category and the captions are interchangeable. If your writing could be copied and pasted onto a competitor’s account without anyone noticing, it is doing nothing for you.

It hides the interesting part. The story about the pipe through the joist is genuinely interesting. It shows diagnosis, it shows a real problem being solved, and it gives the reader something to picture. The corporate version has all of that surgically removed.

It makes you sound bigger and worse. Small businesses often adopt corporate language believing it makes them seem more professional. It mostly makes them seem generic, and it discards the actual advantage of being small, which is that a person is involved.

The fix, which is uncomfortably simple

Write the caption the way you would say it to somebody standing next to you looking at the same photo.

That is the whole technique. It sounds too simple to be useful and it is the entire thing.

Try it literally. Look at the photo, imagine a friend has just asked “what’s that?”, and type your answer. Do not edit it into something more professional afterwards. That editing step is where the damage happens.

“What’s that?”
“Rotted sill on a place over in the north end. Whole corner had gone soft because a gutter’s been overflowing into it for probably ten years. Cut it back to good wood and replaced about four feet.”

That is a complete caption. It is better than anything in the corporate register, it took twenty seconds, and it required no writing ability whatsoever.

The structure underneath

If you want something more explicit than “write how you talk,” most good captions do the same three things.

Say what it is. Plainly, in one line, so somebody scrolling understands the image immediately.

Add one piece of information. Why it happened, what it took, what was surprising, what to watch out for. This is the part that justifies the post existing.

Stop.

That third instruction is the one people ignore. There is a strong urge to append something: a call to action, a string of hashtags, an invitation to get in touch. Resist it most of the time. A post that simply shows good work and explains it does its job, and constant asking makes an account feel like a sales channel, which reduces how much anyone wants to look at it.

Things to cut

Adjectives about your own quality. Exceptional, outstanding, premium, top notch. Every one of these is you grading yourself, which readers correctly ignore. Show the work instead.

“We pride ourselves on.” Never necessary.

Exclamation marks in bulk. One is fine. Three in a caption reads as nervous.

Third person about yourself. “The team at Dave’s Roofing is pleased to announce.” You are Dave. Say “we” or “I.”

Hashtag walls. Thirty hashtags looks like spam to humans and does much less than people think. A few relevant ones, if any.

A call to action on every single post. Occasionally, when there is a real reason.

Things to add

Place names. “Over in the north end” is better than “a recent project.” Specificity makes it real and it quietly signals your service area.

Mild honesty about difficulty. “That one took longer than I expected” is disarming and human. Businesses are afraid this makes them look less competent. It does the opposite, because only somebody confident admits a job was hard.

The problem, not just the result. What was wrong is more interesting than what it looks like finished.

Actual numbers when you have them. “Four feet of sill” beats “a section of the sill.” Precision reads as competence.

Your own idioms. However you actually describe things. The regional phrase, the trade slang. This is the part that cannot be copied by a competitor.

On voice consistency

You will read advice about developing a brand voice, with documents and adjectives and tone guidelines.

For a business of one to ten people, you already have one. It is how you talk. The work is not developing a voice, it is not replacing the one you have with a worse one borrowed from a corporate template.

If several people post, the useful version of a voice guide is one page: write like you are explaining it to a customer, be specific, no adjectives about our own quality, no exclamation marks in bulk. That is enough to keep things coherent without turning anybody into a robot.

The test

Read the caption out loud before posting.

If you would feel ridiculous saying it to an actual person, rewrite it. If it sounds like something you might genuinely say, post it.

This single test catches almost everything. The corporate register is physically uncomfortable to speak aloud, which is a reliable signal that nobody wants to read it either.

Why this is worth the attention

Your captions are one of the few places where being small is an advantage rather than a limitation.

A large company cannot write “that one was a nightmare, the previous guy had run the pipe through a joist.” It has to go through approval, get sanded down, and emerge as “our team resolved a complex installation challenge.” Their scale forces the generic voice on them.

You are not forced into it. You are choosing it, usually by accident, by imitating businesses whose constraints are not yours.

Stop doing that and you sound like a person who knows what they are doing, in a feed full of businesses that all sound like the same press release. That is not a small differentiator. It costs nothing, it requires no skill you do not already have, and it is available immediately.

Write it the way you would say it. Then stop.

Length, and when to say more

Most captions should be short. Two to four sentences covers the majority.

But there is a category worth writing at length, and businesses underuse it: the post where something genuinely interesting happened.

If you found something unusual behind a wall, solved a problem three other people failed to solve, or made a decision that saved the customer significant money, that is worth six or eight sentences. Tell it properly, as a story, with the problem first.

Those posts consistently outperform short ones, for the obvious reason that there is something to read. The mistake is not writing long captions. It is writing long captions with nothing in them.

So: short by default, long when there is a story. Never long because you felt a post should be substantial.

Writing for the person who does not know you

One adjustment worth making, because it is the most common blind spot.

You are usually writing as though the reader knows what you do. They frequently do not. Somebody who arrived from a search, or who was sent your page by a friend, may not know what trade you are in, let alone what a soffit is.

Two habits fix this without dumbing anything down.

Name the trade occasionally. Not every post, but often enough that a stranger scrolling ten posts works out what you do.

Explain jargon in passing. Not a definition, just a clause. “Replaced the sill, which is the timber that sits under the window and takes all the water.” One extra clause, no condescension, and now the post works for everyone.

This is the difference between a feed that makes sense to your peers and one that makes sense to your customers. A surprising number of trade accounts are unintentionally written for other people in the trade.

The one place a call to action belongs

I said to stop after the information, and mostly that is right. Here is the exception.

When you have actual availability, say so plainly. “Got a gap the week after next if anyone needs anything.” That is useful information rather than a generic ask, and it converts, because it is specific and time bound and it gives somebody who has been meaning to call a reason to do it now.

Compare that to “Contact us today to learn more about our services!” appended to every post, which is not information and which everyone has learned to skip.

Ask when you have something to ask about. The rest of the time, just show the work and let it do the arguing.

This article contains no statistics. Where numbers appear elsewhere on this site, they are measured with free public tools or cited to a named source.