Need some insight on Facebook and Instagram copy best practices? With the platforms constantly updating, it can be tricky to know how to format copy for your ads. That’s why we’ve compiled (and will continually update) the ad specs you need to optimize copy for each platform.

Click here for the Ultimate Facebook & Instagram Copy Specs Guide.

Facebook and Instagram Copy Best Practices:

1. USE THE COPY SPECS GUIDE Seriously. If your text is truncating before you’ve hooked your audience – your copy is a waste. Facebook is consistently updating their platform and the character limit changes without warning. Don’t assume that it’s what it was last week, check back to our copy spec guide. We’ll keep it up to date so you don’t miss a click. 

2. Start With Multiple Copy Variations

Find out what plays best with your audience by starting an ad set with multiple copy variations. Try different copy lengths, different headlines, and different tones – if one set of copy is outperforming, turn off the others and test that version further. The more copy sets you test, the more you’ll be able to inform your writing on what plays best with your audience. 

3. Power Words

Best practice is don’t use passive voice – especially in your headlines! Power words evoke emotion and compel your reader to take action. Here are a few of our favorite power words to work into copy:

A study by Outbrain found that negative superlatives like “bad,” “worst,” and “never” work 30% better at catching attention than positive ones like “always” or “best.” Why? The report points to the evolutionary benefits of responding to threats. After recording the physiological responses (sweat output & heart rate) the study found that negative stories grabbed attention and provoked a reaction… positive stories? Not so much. Use this when you’re crafting your headlines and your ad copy. Don’t be a doom crow, but use strategic negativity to instill a sense of urgency in your target audience.

5. Emojis

A study at Tokyo Denki University tested how our brains process different types of characters. It found that the emotional processing center of the participants’ brains was activated when they read text with emojis. If the goal of your writing is to evoke emotion, emojis can get you there!

6. Convey Features

Pick a few key features of your offering and expound on what they are. You know all about your product and service, but your audience might not understand what you’re really offering them. The features you want to highlight are the ones that will have the most impact on their day to day experience.

7. Promote Benefits

For the features you’re highlighting, expound on the benefits of that feature. It may sound like you’re being too overt, but connect the dots for people. For example, the Apple Watch 5 features Apple Pay. They list the benefits of, “Get your morning coffee, send money to a friend, do it instantly and securely with Apple Pay.” When you explain how your feature can impact the daily life of your customer even simple things that can be assumed you lighten the cognitive load of your text. You also walk your customer through imagining themselves using your product or service (and making their life easier in the process.)

8. Have A Clear Call To Action

Take your key features and benefits and craft a clear, concise call to action. Going back to the Apple Watch, if their highlighted feature what Apple Pay or one of the other functions of the watch, a CTA might be a simple, “Buy Now.” If they were highlighting the feature of being totally customizable, the CTA might be, “Create Your Watch.” The call to action needs to be a plausible next step to move your customer towards experiencing the benefits of the feature you just highlighted.

9. Optimize The Start Of Your Primary Text

Make the first sentence of your primary text a hook or a CTA that will be visible in every view before the text truncates. The primary text is the ONLY copy for your Instagram ads, so you can’t rely on your headline to draw people in or tell them what to do. 

10. Address Common Objections 

Everybody has purchase hesitations from time to time. If you address common objections or barriers to conversion in your ad copy you’re more likely to close sales. For most people, those hesitations revolve around cost and ease. By including copy about how simple it is to work with you and how much people can save over working with your competition, you’ll capture and KEEP your audience. 

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Words are powerful, harness them and your ads can be too. Cheers to writing Facebook and Instagram ads that convert!