Free AI Caption Generator for Social Media [FREE TOOL] (2024)

FREE TOOLS

Skip the brainstorm and fast-forward to the good part — your post going viral on social media — with this AI social media post generator. It's your new shortcut to more engagement, more sales, and more high-fives from your boss.

Why use this free AI caption generator for social media?

This free social media post generator will change the way you build your content calendar for the better. Not only will it simplify the copywriting part of your job, but it will also help you come up with hashtag ideas and keywords so your posts have a better chance of getting seen by the masses.

You can also use the tool to rephrase existing captions you’ve already generated or posted. Simply add your existing caption to the tool and it’ll zhush it right up. Boom — you’ve got yourself a shiny new list of AI-generated social media posts to add to your calendar.

Basically, this tool is like adding a copywriting assistant to your team. And one who happens to know the algorithm inside out, works at 10x speed, and always responds when you need them.

How to use this AI caption generator

We designed our social media caption generator to take the brain-racking out of the copywriting process, saving you time and energy. All you have to do is add a bit of information and the tool will generate a list of caption options that you can copy and paste into your content calendar or the Composer window.

Step 1: Select your network

First: tell the tool which network you want to generate captions for. It'll provide captions for Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.

Step 2: Select your style

You didn’t think our caption creator would serve up boring or generic copy, did you? Of course not! The first step in generating captions that match your voice and branding. Select from the long list of tones in the drop-down menu to find a style that sounds right.

Step 3: Select your language

No surprise here, but our caption generator is multilingual. To ensure that it speaks your language — or the language of your target audience — choose your preference from the dropdown menu. It will generate captions in English, Spanish, Italian, French, and German.

Step 4: Add a short description

The robots are smart, but they can’t read your mind (yet). Be sure to tell them a little bit about your post in the description field. No need to get super-specific or detailed. A few words or phrases are enough to get you started.

Step 5: Add a few keywords

Adding the right keywords to your social media captions can boost your social SEO strategy by helping your content appear in search and on explore pages. Don’t overthink it, though! Add a few words or phrases to help the social media algorithms categorize your content.

How does the AI caption generator work?

Hootsuite’s free caption generator is powered by ChatGPT 3.5 (GPT-3.5). ChatGPT is a natural language processing chatbot developed by OpenAI. Because it was trained by reading millions of texts online, the tool is capable of having human-like conversations and generating an infinite number of unique responses. That’s what makes ChatGPT so ideal for tasks like automating the caption-writing process.

What’s the best AI tool for social media captions?

Hootsuite offers the best AI tools for social media captions. We’re a bit biased, of course, but our OwlyWriter AI tool stands out from the rest for a few key reasons.

First and foremost: it was trained by the O.G. social media experts. We have over 15 years of experience in social media management, and we know the social media algorithms — and the formulas for winning them over — inside and out.

Next: we’ve developed our AI writing tool specifically with social media managers in mind. That means it will eliminate the most common pain points of the job, from coming up with content ideas to including the right hashtags.

OwlyWriter AI even offers captions that follow expert copywriting formulas, such as "Hook posts" or "Problem, Agitate, Solution posts."

These are just some of the ways OwlyWriter AI is an even savvier and more in-depth version of this free caption generator. Give it a whirl today with a free trial.

How long should social media captions be?

This free AI social media post generator works for all your most-used social media platforms, but before you go copy-pasting into your content calendar, you might need to do some quick pruning. Make sure your captions line up with each network’s character limits and follow our recommended best practices. This will ensure that your message doesn’t get cut off (or worse, ignored).

How long should Instagram captions be?

Instagram limits captions to 2,200 characters per post, but that doesn’t mean you should use all that space. In fact, it’s best to keep your Insta captions short. We’ve found that the sweet spot is somewhere between 138 and 150 characters of text. If you do need to post something with lots of information, make sure to break it up with line breaks to make it easier to read.

How should long Facebook captions be?

Unsurprisingly, since it leans more text-heavy than other networks, Facebook lets users post more words than most. You’ve got 33,000 characters to use before Facebook will cut you off. (For reference, you’d need about five times the amount of text on the page you’re reading right now to reach that limit).

Naturally, we don’t recommend using all those characters — the average attention span of a human is only a few seconds, after all. So how long should your Facebook captions be, then? According to the experts (us), you should stick to a max of 80 characters for organic Facebook posts and between five and 19 words for paid posts.

How long should LinkedIn captions be?

For organic posts, LinkedIn lets users add up to 3,000 characters. You won’t be surprised to learn that we don’t recommend using all those characters in a single post, though. In fact, we’ve found that it’s best to keep your LinkedIn updates to no more than 25 words each. LinkedIn users like things short and sweet, too.

How long should Twitter captions be?

Twitter famously doubled its post character limit in 2017, upping it from 140 to 280 characters per tweet. And then, in 2023, it announced that Twitter Blue subscribers could tweet up to 10,000 characters at a time. We wouldn’t recommend buying the upgrade if you have more to say, though. Users are more likely to engage with your content if you stick to between 71 and 100 characters per tweet.

How long should TikTok captions be?

We already know that, in general, people don’t stop scrolling to read tons of text. But this is especially true on TikTok, where attention spans are even shorter than usual. The app upped its description character limit from 300 characters to 2,200 characters in 2022, meaning you now get plenty of room to extrapolate if need be.

It’s best to keep your TikTok captions short, though, since most users aren’t likely to slow their scroll to read a big block of text. Ideally, keep them to no more than 150 characters. If you want people to read your caption on TikTok, you really need to make sure those first few lines are attention-grabbing. Users have to click “more” to read more than a few words of your text.

How long should Pinterest captions be?

Writing crafty Pinterest captions is a great way to ensure that your content shows up in search, but you don’t want to overdo it on this network, either. Pinterest gives users up to 500 characters to describe each Pin, with 100 extra characters for the title. Pinterest recommends sticking to 40 characters max for the title and 50 characters max for the description since that’s all that usually shows up in people’s feeds.