If you’re uploading videos online, you need to be adding captions to your videos. If you need a reason, look no further than these stats:
The most recent data shows that 85% of the videos that get watched on Facebook are watched without sound and videos with captions get 12% more view time than those without captions.
If that isn’t enough to convince you to add closed captions to your online videos, we have three more great reasons for you:
1. Silent Autoplaying Videos
If you’ve used Facebook or Instagram over the last year, you’ve noticed that when a video comes up in your feed and starts to play, it doesn’t have any sound unless you choose to unmute it. With some messages, it helps to be able to speak to your audience with an audible human voice, but it doesn’t help if your audience can’t hear what you’re saying. By uploading a caption file to Facebook, viewers will see text overlayed on your video and timed to the words they would hear. That grabs their attention, and then they can choose to either continue watching the video on silent and read the captions or turn on the sound.
2. Algorithms
When a video ends on Facebook or YouTube and you see suggested videos to watch, those were suggested by an algorithm. As smart as computers are, they still struggle to understand videos like we do. By adding captions to your video, computers can read the caption file and have a better understanding of what your video is about. The more information that can go into the algorithm, the more likely your video is to be positioned where it will be viewed and enjoyed by your target audience.
3. Hearing Impaired
The reason captions were created in the first place was to help the hearing impaired understand what’s being said. Adding captions to your video allows those with hearing impairments to read the audio being spoken, which expands your potential audience.
Now that you know why you need captions, how does Chuba Creative do it? We don’t! Well, sorta...
Adding captions manually can be quite tedious, and if you don’t know the formatting style, you can end up doing more harm than good. We use Rev.com (no affiliation or sponsorship) because it’s simply the best closed captioning company you can get without paying a fortune. It adds captions to videos for $1/minute with shocking speed and precision. At the end, you can download your caption file in any format you need and you’re on your way within a few hours.
For all the videos we create at Chuba Creative, we include caption files because they’re vital for online performance. If you’re making your own videos, you need to try this out.