25 Claude prompts for Instagram posts

Most prompt lists written for one model work in every model, because most of them are just the sentence write me an Instagram caption with extra adjectives. This one is not that. Claude has two properties that change how you should prompt it, and ignoring them is why people try it, decide it writes like a consultant, and go back to what they had.

The first is that it will take a great deal of context at once and keep using it, which means the work goes into the setup rather than into each prompt. The second is that its default register is long, balanced and slightly formal, which is close to the opposite of a good caption. Both are fixable in one sitting.

What to expect from Claude, plainly

This is a description of tendencies we have had to work around, not a scorecard. Check each one against what you get today, because these things move.

Set the project up once

Claude lets you create a project with its own instructions and its own uploaded knowledge, described in Anthropic's own documentation, and set account-wide instructions on top of that, described in their page on personalisation. This is the part people skip, and skipping it is why the output reads like it was written for a generic business, because it was.

1. Turn your website into a usable brief

I am going to paste the text of my website. Read it and write me a factual profile of this business in under 200 words: what we sell, who buys it, where we are, what we charge if it says, and what makes us different in a way a competitor could not copy and paste. Mark anything you had to guess. Do not make it sound like marketing. Here is the site: [paste]

2. Write the project instructions from it

Turn that profile into instructions for yourself, to be saved as project instructions I will never repeat in a prompt. Include: who we are, who we write for, the three subjects we are credible on, our default caption length, the words and phrases we never use, and a standing rule that you output the post only, with no introduction and no explanation. Keep it under 300 words. Ask me for anything you need rather than filling gaps yourself.

Save that in the project. Everything below assumes it is there, which is why the prompts are short. If you want the longer argument for why this step decides everything downstream, it is in how AI learns your brand voice.

3. Show it fifteen things you actually wrote

Here are 15 captions we have posted ourselves. Do not compliment them. Tell me what is consistently true about how we write: sentence length, how we open, whether we ask questions, how we handle prices, what we never do. Then write six rules that would let someone else write a caption that could pass as ours. Where our writing is inconsistent, say so instead of averaging it.

Uploading examples beats describing yourself, every time. A tone described in adjectives gives you the average of everyone who has ever used those adjectives, which is the actual mechanism behind why AI posts sound like AI.

4. Break your own brief before it costs you a month

Read the project instructions as if you were a competitor down the road. Which lines would be equally true of them? Rewrite only those lines, asking me whatever you need to make them specific to us. Do not add anything that makes us sound more impressive than we are.

Prompts for captions

With the project in place, a caption prompt is one sentence about the post plus the constraints. The constraints are not optional. They are the prompt.

5. One photo into a caption

I am posting a photo of [describe it in one line]. Write the caption. Under 45 words. One idea only. No question at the end. No emoji. Do not describe what is already visible in the picture, tell me the thing the picture cannot say. Output the caption only.

6. Ten first lines, judged separately

Write 10 opening lines for a post about [subject]. Under 9 words each. No questions, no greetings, no rhetorical setup. Five should state a specific fact. Five should start in the middle of something happening. Then mark the two that could only have been written by this business, and delete the rest yourself.

7. The caption that has to sell something

Write a caption for [offer]. Say the price in the first sentence. Say who it is not for. One instruction at the end telling people exactly what to do, in the words they would use. Under 60 words. You may not use the words exclusive, limited, exciting, or the phrase we are thrilled.

Leading with the number is the whole trick, and it works for the same reason it works in video. The argument, and what it costs you to hide the price, is in what social media management actually costs.

8. A caption from a real conversation

A customer said this to me this week: [paste it in their words, including the clumsy bits]. Turn it into a post. Keep their phrasing where you can. The post should answer them properly, including the part where the answer is inconvenient for us. Under 70 words.

9. The ordinary Tuesday post

Nothing interesting happened today. Here is what I actually did: [three bullet points, unedited]. Write a caption that makes one of those worth reading without dressing it up as a lesson about life. If none of the three is worth posting, say so and tell me why.

10. Captions in your customers' words

Here are five enquiries we received, pasted exactly as people wrote them: [paste]. List the words and phrases our customers use that we do not use ourselves. Then rewrite this caption using their vocabulary instead of ours: [paste caption].

11. Hashtags, separately and briefly

Suggest 8 hashtags for this post. Rules: no hashtag with more than a few hundred thousand posts, at least three that name the specific thing in the picture, at least two that a person in our town would plausibly follow. No generic ones. Explain nothing.

Instagram allows up to thirty tags per post, according to its own help pages, which is not a target. Whether they are worth the effort at all is argued out in do hashtags still work.

Prompts for carousels

Carousels are where a model that writes long is finally an advantage, provided you cap every slide. The failure mode is a carousel that is one essay chopped into ten pieces, none of which stands on its own.

12. An outline before any writing

Outline a 7 slide carousel about [subject]. One line per slide describing what it says, nothing written out yet. Slide one has to work alone in a feed. Slides two to six each carry exactly one idea. Slide seven is the thing everyone gets wrong. If two slides make the same point, merge them and give me six.

13. Write it to a hard cap

Now write the carousel from that outline. Maximum 18 words per slide, counted, and tell me the count after each one. No slide may begin with the word and or so. Slide one gets a maximum of 8 words. Output the slides only.

14. The caption underneath it

Write the caption that sits under this carousel. It must not summarise the slides, because anyone reading it has already swiped. Add the one thing that did not fit: the exception, the cost, or what to do if this does not apply to you. Under 50 words.

15. Turn a long answer into slides

Here is a long answer I gave a client by email: [paste]. Turn it into a carousel without simplifying the substance. Keep every number and every name of a thing. Remove the politeness, the context setting and anything that only made sense in an email. Tell me what you cut.

Prompts for a batch

One caption at a time is how this becomes a chore. Doing a fortnight in one sitting is how it stays possible, and it is also the point at which the setup work pays for itself.

16. Twenty ideas from what you actually did

Here is what happened at work last month: [ten lines, unpolished]. Give me 20 post ideas drawn only from that list. No idea may be a tip, a quote or a day of the week. Next to each, write the picture I would have to take, and cross out any idea where I cannot take that picture.

If that list comes back thin, the problem is not the prompt. It is that there is nothing being written down as it happens, which is the situation what a small business should post about exists to fix.

17. A fortnight in one table

Take these 8 approved ideas and write all 8 captions in one go, as a table: date, first line, full caption, what the picture shows. Same rules as always, under 45 words each. No two captions may open the same way, and no two may use the same sentence rhythm. Do not comment on the table.

18. Make it check its own repetition

Read those 8 captions as a run, the way a follower would see them over two weeks. Which two feel like the same post? Which word appears in more than three of them? Rewrite only what you flagged, and leave everything else exactly as it is.

That last one catches the thing nobody notices in isolation. A batch approved caption by caption can still read as one voice repeating itself, and the fix is to review the run rather than the item, which is most of what makes approving a week of content in five minutes possible.

19. The same post for the other channels

Rewrite this Instagram caption for Facebook, for LinkedIn and for a Google Business post. Not three copies with the length changed. Each one has to assume a different reader: neighbours, peers, and somebody searching for us right now who has never heard of us. Keep the facts identical across all three.

Prompts for editing what it gave you

These four are the ones we use daily. They are short on purpose, because you will paste them a hundred times.

20. Remove the packaging

Give me that again with nothing around it. No introduction, no explanation of your choices, no closing offer to adjust it. The caption, and nothing else.

21. Take the hedges out

Delete every hedge in this caption. That includes can help, might, often, some people find, and every sentence that softens the previous sentence. If a claim cannot survive being stated plainly, cut the claim rather than qualifying it. Show me what you removed.

22. Kill the shapes that give it away

Find every sentence in this caption built on a pattern rather than on something we know. Specifically: it is not just X, it is Y. Three items in a rising list. A short sentence for emphasis. Any sentence beginning with In today's or Whether you are. Rewrite each one as a plain statement of fact, or delete it.

23. Halve it, keep the facts

Cut this caption by half. Every number, name and specific detail must survive. What goes is setup, transition, and any sentence restating the one before it. If something has to go, remove opinion and keep fact. Show the short version only.

24. Score it and then stop

Score this caption out of 10 against the project instructions, on two separate things: how specific it is to us, and how much it sounds like a person typed it. Do not average them. If both are 8 or above, reply with the word fine and nothing else. Otherwise say what to change in one sentence, and do not rewrite it.

The stop condition is the important half. Asked to improve something, a model will improve it indefinitely, and the fourth revision is usually worse than the first in the specific way that matters, which is that it now sounds like a model wrote it four times.

The one about the picture

25. A shot brief you can actually take

For this caption, tell me what to photograph. One shot, taken on a phone, in a place I already am, with no props I have not mentioned. Say where the light comes from and what should be in the frame besides the subject. If the honest answer is that this post needs a photo I cannot take today, say so and suggest a different post.

Treat the writing as the smaller half of an Instagram post, because it is. If the picture is the part that keeps stalling you, the equivalent set for video is our prompts for Instagram Reels scripts, which are written around one person filming alone.

Does any of this work in other models

Almost all of it. The project setup translates to a saved Gem in Gemini or a custom GPT, the caption prompts are portable as written, and the editing prompts help everywhere because every model has house habits. What changes is which habits you have to instruct away. Our set for the other two is in Gemini prompts for social media and Copilot prompts for LinkedIn posts, and the model-neutral originals are in 18 ChatGPT prompts for social media.

Where this stops being worth doing by hand

Running twenty five prompts is enjoyable in week one and tedious by week five. The setup does not decay, but you do, and the failure is never dramatic. It is a Thursday where you have the project, the prompts and the ideas, and you simply do not open the tab.