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23/08/22

Why You Should Be Using ALT Text on Your Instagram Posts

Instagram is one of the most used marketing channels to promote businesses and services and is highly influential in brand awareness. To be as accessible as possible, in 2018 Instagram released an SEO-style feature to their platform, ALT text. This describes your posts for people with visual impairments and gets your content into the explore page, in front of those who are interested in similar things. This feature helps boosts performance and awareness, however, marketers are only just starting to use it, as a growing number of accounts are seeing fantastic results.

For the SEO savvy among you, you’ll know ALT text is most commonly used on Google to help the search engine understand the image being displayed as they can’t read an image as a human can. Instagram is constantly evolving and updating its platform to help marketers and businesses improve their sales and brand awareness. Over the years they have adapted their algorithm to utilise different aspects of the platform such as hashtags, ALT texts, product feeds and more which makes it important to be up to date with these changes in your strategy so you can get the best out of Instagram.

 

What Is ALT Text?

 

ALT text is short and means alternative text. This describes the image when it fails to load due to internet connectivity, or for those who need a screen reader to access content on the platform. This is used on websites, and now more frequently on social media platforms, making the platform more accessible to others. This feature also can help increase your performance on Instagram posts.

How Does It Work?

Similar to Google, using ALT text allows the Instagram algorithm to understand the content and place the posts in the relevant explore pages where the relevant audience can engage. There is also talk about Google starting to show Instagram posts within the image search section on the site, which will increase reach and engagement dramatically.

 

How To Add ALT Text To Your Instagram Posts:

 

Instagram uses object recognition technology to generate an automatic ALT text for all content that is generated, however, they lack accuracy and information about the product/brand which can be improved dramatically by a human to see the results that you want in terms of performance. That’s why it’s important to edit the text to reflect the context in detail to allow the algorithm to understand and show it in front of the correct people.

Adding On New Posts

 

  1. Once selecting the image that you would like to post, select advanced settings, and click “write ALT text”
  2. Create a descriptive ALT text that reflects the content and click “save”

On Previous Posts:

  1. Select the image you want to add an ALT text on and proceed with the steps as if you wanted to edit the caption
  2. Select “edit ALT text”
  3. Create a descriptive ALT text that reflects the content that is in the post and click “done”

 

 

Best Practices For ALT Texts

 

  • Keep within 100 words so that the content is displayed correctly
  • Be specific so that the algorithm displays your content in front of the correct audience
  • Include a keyword in the content, so that the main focus is recognised by the algorithm, however, don’t stuff and keep within the word count
  • Include brand and product name and location if applicable.

 

So yes, ALT texts are typically used to allow those with impairments to experience social media by having content read out to them describing the post, but it can also be used to reach more users that are interested in your content by taking advantage of Instagram features as well as understanding the algorithm as much as possible.

 

Try adding ALT texts to your posts and improve your Instagram marketing strategy or contact our team of experts for more information.