Social captions without the cringe
Why AI captions sound hollow, and a five-step edit that makes them sound like a person again.
You can spot an unedited AI caption from across the room. It opens with a rhetorical question, contains the word "journey", ends with three hashtags and a rocket, and says absolutely nothing. The model isn't the problem; the brief was empty, so it filled the space with the average of the internet.
Give it a fact to hang on
"Write a caption about our new candle" produces mush. "Write a caption about our new candle: burns 40 hours, smells like woodsmoke and orange peel, made in small batches in Coventry" produces something worth posting. Facts are the raw material; without them there's only filler.
The five-step edit
- Delete the first sentence — it's almost always a warm-up.
- Replace any abstract noun with a concrete detail.
- Cut every adjective that could describe any product.
- Read it aloud; fix anything you wouldn't say to a customer.
- Keep one clear ask at the end, and only one.
Words to ban outright
Elevate, unlock, game-changer, delve, seamless, curated, journey, exciting news, we are thrilled. Not because they're wrong, but because they're the vocabulary of an account nobody follows on purpose. Put them in a banned-words line in your prompt and never think about them again.
Match the platform's rhythm
- Instagram: first line must work alone, the rest is for the interested.
- LinkedIn: short paragraphs, one specific lesson, no motivational poster.
- Threads and X: one idea, no wind-up.
- TikTok: the caption serves the video, so keep it under a line.
Build a voice file
Collect your ten best-performing captions in one document and paste it with every prompt as the voice reference. This single habit does more for consistency than any tone setting, because the model is imitating you rather than imitating marketing.
Generated first draft, human final line. That's the whole workflow, and it's fast enough to do on a phone between jobs.