From Social Media Week:
I’m sure that when they were first composing captions for their Student Government Association at University of Maryland Eastern Shore, Ja’Bre Jennings and Juwon Nicholson couldn’t have imagined they’d one day build a business around the snappy words they’d add to photos. But only a few years later, they’re garnering good buzz for their app, Caption Any Photo , designed to share their talents with the masses.
Caption Any Photo was born in an MBA class Jennings was taking; he developed the app as part of an assignment. But once the project was completed, he realized the idea had legs. Calling upon his friend and business partner, they did market research with college students, touring the East Coast during homecoming season to ask attendees how they felt about the app, if they’d use it, and how to improve it.
What resulted from this unconventional market research was an app that can help caption photos in categories like Homecoming, Girls’ Night Out, Selfies, Mardi Gras, and many more. At present, a combination of user submissions and captions developed with machine learning and data analytics has created a database of over 35,000 captions. But they have their sights set higher than their initial college student market; they’re now hoping to assist solopreneurs and small businesses increase engagement in ways that affect their bottom line.
“A lot of businesses were having a lack of engagement due to not knowing what to post. Once you find the photo, we give you the quote and caption to actually let you post to social media and increase engagement,” Jennings said to Blavity. These captions, when deployed thoughtfully, can drive people to needed products or services – something Jennings and Nicholson learned when doing social media work previously for the Mayor’s Office of Employment Development. There, they realized that captions are more than just a way to make friends laugh or express yourself; they could be key to driving users toward much needed but occasionally stigmatized services.
Link to the rest at Social Media Week
You can find Caption Any Photo in Apple’s IOS App Store.
Although PG may have overlooked it in the Caption Any Photo website, but it appears that, at present, you can’t match images and captions on a computer (although PG understands most social media pros (not the celebrities or other clients they work for) don’t create most of the image/caption combinations they use on Pinterest, Instagram, etc., on their phones because it’s faster to do it on a computer), so he created a faux Instagram post by combining an image with a Caption Any Photo caption he got on his phone.
