Long form captions are all the rage right now. Gone are the days of posting one Lana Del Rey lyric or a few emojis as your Instagram caption, we’re now using captions as a microblogging platform. We fully endorse the long form caption, by the way! However, there’s nothing more daunting than seeing a cool Instagram photo and then seeing a massive caption that’s not even broken up into separate paragraphs.

For some bizarre reason, you cannot put real line breaks in your Instagram caption when you type out your caption right on Instagram. I have yet to determine why this might be (if there’s even a reason at all). You may have resorted to posting a . or - or even emojis in place of a line break.

But don’t worry! There are some ways you can around this issue and put some beautiful, spacious line breaks in your caption.

How We Add Line Breaks

There are different ways to break up the paragraphs in your caption, but this is our strategy of choice. It is what we use for our own accounts, as well as for our clients accounts.

Formatting Captions With Planoly

Planoly is our favorite Instagram scheduler. If you haven’t read our full post on Planoly, check it out here. Along with the ability to visually plan out your Instagram feed and schedule and auto-post to your feed or stories, you can write out and save your captions.

When we plan our Instagram content or our client’s content, we aim to always have posts scheduled out for at least the next two weeks. Our Instagram posting process on Planoly is:

Upload images
Arrange the posts in a visually-appealing manner
Write out the caption for each post (styled with line breaks)
Schedule post and turn on auto-post

One of the coolest parts of this process is that when the caption is transferred from Planoly to Instagram, it will have the line breaks!

HOWEVER, you need to be sure that you do not have an extra space at the end of a line before you press enter. This corrupts the caption transfer and the caption will look messed up on Instagram. By this, I mean that once you complete a paragraph, be sure to press enter immediately after your punctuation or last character. Do not press space before you press enter.

And that’s it! Pretty cool, huh?

Pro tip: Even if you don’t use Planoly to schedule posts ahead of time, you can use this strategy. Instead of posting directly to Instagram and typing out the caption there, upload your post to Planoly. Type your caption there, then share to Instagram!

other ways to add line breaks

Other visual Instagram schedulers: Preview, Plann, Sked
Use this free tool to type out your caption as you want it to look. Click convert then copy/paste to Instagram!
If you are on a mobile device, you can add invisible line breaks. Thanks to this article from Sked Social, we discovered that if you type out your caption in your phone’s notes, you can create invisible line breaks. In place of your line break, paste [ ⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀⠀]. This will appear as a line break on Instagram!