Search is the new feed
A third of under-25s open a social app to look something up. Your posts are now answers whether you wrote them that way or not.
The search bar in TikTok and Instagram gets more use every quarter, and the posts that surface are not the ones that went viral. They are the ones that answered the query.
This changes what a caption is for. It is no longer a place for the brand voice to be charming. It is metadata. The first line should be the question the post answers, in the words someone would type.
It also changes the lifespan of a post. A viral post lives three days. A post that ranks for 'best rope for sport climbing' lives until someone makes a better one.
We now write two versions of every caption: one for the feed and one for search. The search one wins on revenue in every account we have tested.