We understand the time and effort that goes into creating video content, from pre to post-production, which is why it’s essential your not wasting any time. Ensure your audience is able to consume the value you’re providing and receive the most out of it and increase engagement.
In this blog post, we’re going to present you with one IMPORTANT tip that will help you boost engagement on the videos you create.
Did you know that 85% of people watching videos on Facebook watch with the SOUND off?
This means, that ONLY 15% of people are watching with the sound on, so now it’s important to have a think about the videos you’ve posted on Facebook that don’t have captions.
This is exactly why adding captions to your video is crucial.
Majority of the time people are watching videos on silent so they need the captions to be able to have some kind of context on the content you have published.
With no captions on videos, it’s difficult to capture the attention of your audience and this is where it can have a big impact on the engagement your video receives.
To create captions, it is approximately $1 per minute and an excellent investment. You are ensuring that 85% of your audience will be able to understand what is being spoken about in your video.
With no captions, it’s very unlikely someone will stop scrolling and listen.
Remember, the aim is to get the most out of the content you’re creating, so your focus needs to be the majority, rather than tailoring your content to the 15% of people who watch your videos.
It’s also refreshing to know that you are catering to individuals who have a hearing impairment or are deaf, so you are increasing accessibility in this process.
The best practice to use is to publish a video to the platform (how you naturally would), and they provide a caption service within the Video Editor.
However it is not 100% accurate so if there are caption errors it can take a long time to fix.
The best option is to use a service called Rev, which is a great tool for creating captions and also transcriptions for your video, for $1 per minute.
It’s very easy, all you need to do is upload your video to Rev – typically, if it’s a short video you’ll get it back within the hour or at the latest 24 hours for longer video.
You’ll get back an SRT file which you can upload to Facebook natively and your video will have excellent captions!
A very similar process on LinkedIn, but unfortunately, they don’t have a caption service at this time, so the best option is to upload your video via Rev to obtain the SRT file.
However if you have already done this, you can use the SRT file when you upload your video to LinkedIn.
Note, you need to upload in a MP4 format on LinkedIn, if you don’t, you will be unable to edit your video (title, thumbnail, and captions), but if you do, a box will appear in the top-right-hand corner of the preview before you publish and that’s where you can make edits and add your captions.
Additionally, this cannot be done through third-party scheduling platforms such as Hootsuite or Buffer, you need to directly upload your video to be able to have access to the captions function.
Instagram is very popular for video content. The way you can add captions to your video is to add your captions as “hard captions” as text when editing your video content.
With a video editor, they can do this very simply for you but otherwise, you can add captions to your video before exporting it.
For an example of this, head to Gary Vee’s Instagram to get a better idea of what it looks like to add hard captions to your Instagram video.
Instagram stories are MASSIVELY popular and they’re only going to get bigger, so it is beneficial to also upload your video with hard captions to your story.
But if you’re taking a natural or raw video on your story the best thing to do is to use the text feature within Instagram stories, to add a little note or dot point that adds context to what you’re talking about, because again, not everyone will be watching with the audio on.
The best practice is to upload your video natively to YouTube and ensure you enable the ability for your video to have captions, particularly closed captions.
The easiest way to do this is to go to your Video Manager, select “Create a Studio” > select “Video Manager” > then click on Videos, this gives you the option to select the video you want to add closed captions.
Next to the video you want to add captions to, click on the drop-down menu, next to the “Edit” button, that’ll give you the option to select subtitles and closed captions, and you can add new subtitles from there.
A little tip: if you don’t want to use Rev, what you can do is upload your content to YouTube first, and then use the closed captions service to download the SRT file from YouTube, and then upload it to places like Facebook and LinkedIn.
This is another way around it so you don’t have to use Rev, it takes a little more effort, but you don’t need to spend $1 per minute to get the captions you want.
To download a caption file from your video on YouTube, go to Creator Studio > Edit > Select Subtitles > Closed Captions, then you can click on “English” under “Published”, which will provide the option to download your closed captions as an SRT file.
Note, this only works if the video is the exact same length as the video you intend to upload to Facebook or LinkedIn (the same start and finish time).
Be careful in this process, I do highly recommend using Rev as your preferred captions provider because it’s a really seamless process and takes care of it all for you, with 99.9% accuracy.
The amount of video content that is being consumed online daily is RIDICULOUS and is increasing! It’s important that you are taking the necessary steps to ensure your audience can get the most out of the content you provide.
Using captions ensures that there will be a higher percentage of people watching your videos than if no captions were available. We need to ensure we are maximising ROI when it comes to creating video content, so adding captions to your videos is essentially a no-brainer.
Keep your eyes peeled for future blog posts for all things business, entrepreneurship, and digital marketing to help you turn your business into an iconic brand!
