Instagram does not let you add text formatting to your post’s captions. Instead, it forces you to use dashes and emoji instead. This sucks. Thankfully, there is another way to add paragraph breaks!
If you use Instagram and you regularly post long(ish) captions, you will know that Instagram’s naive text editor is utter rubbish. You cannot add paragraphs, it doesn’t allow formatting of any kind, and this makes life miserable for anyone that wants to add more than a few words to their Instagram posts.
As always, with a little digging and research, workarounds can be found. And the one I’m going to share with you today is bloody fantastic. I wasted hours trying to figure out and implement text formatting on KYM’s Instagram to no avail. Don’t be like me; follow the steps below and save yourself a BUNCH of time.
Adding Text Formatting To Instagram Captions
OK, first off, you’ll want to download a text editor; you can use Pages on iPhone or your Notes app or any of the widely available free word processors for Android and iPhone. I use Android and find WriterP to be the most useful (you can get it here); it has great formatting, it simple to use, and saves all your work in an easy-to-use filing system.
Once you’ve composed your caption, you’ll want to go to this website – I know it looks dodgy, but it works great, trust me! Then, all you have to do is copy in your text, click the button to copy it to your phone’s clipboard and then paste it in your Instagram post and, BOOM, you got a nicely formatted text post.
Simple, right?
So Why The Hell Doesn’t Instagram Allow This?
I’ve been scratching my head about this ever since I first started using Instagram. I get that it is 100% about the images. But I know for a fact that brands and, in particular, researchers and journalists like to share extended commentary on their posts. But natively you simply cannot do this. I mean, you can, but it’ll look like this – and that’s a mess.
But once you use the above-mentioned steps, you can turn that mess into this beautifully formatted arrangement of text. As you can see below, you have clear paragraph breaks and this makes reading extended posts all the easier. You can convey information in bite-sized chunks that make reading longer Instagram captions an absolute breeze.
The Importance of Properly Formatted Text
If you’re a brand and you’re using Instagram to communicate a message to potential customers and clients, wouldn’t you want that message to be as clear as possible? You don’t want vital information getting lost in a wall of text or, worse, people simply not reading it because it looks, well… like a massive wall of freakin’ text.
This simple hack solves this issue. It is simple to implement too. In fact, it actually saves you time in way too. I pre-write a bunch of Instagram posts in one sitting and save them to WriterP. I have the link to the formatting tool saved in my Google Keep application, so whenever I want to post on Instagram, all I need is a photo and I’m away. The caption is just a copy-and-paste away.
And you don’t have to be a brand to implement this kind of thing, either. Communicating clearly with your followers is of paramount importance. I have no idea why Instagram makes adding formatted text so difficult, but at least you now have a way around this problem until Instagram decides to pull its finger out and implement native formatting for captions.
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Richard Goodwin
Richard Goodwin has been working as a tech journalist for over 10 years. He is the editor and owner of KnowYourMobile.