Video is taking marketers by storm as a champion for attracting and engaging internet users. Over half a billion people watch Facebook videos daily, and nearly one-third of all online activities involve watching videos. With such massive engagement, it’s clear that video marketing is an essential tool for reaching the right audience at the right time.
One surefire way to boost your video’s effectiveness? Captions! As surprising as it may sound, many marketers overlook the power of subtitles. Yet, adding captions is one of the easiest ways to improve engagement, accessibility, and retention.
Want to take your video content to the next level? Mosaic Media Films can help!
Let’s discuss the importance of captions in your video’s performance to understand how they can be used to go that extra mile.
What Video Captions Are?
Video captions or Subtitles, as they are popularly known, are the written texts put atop a video representing the verbal speech of the video. They can help clarify what’s being spoken in the view and can be classified as Open or Closed. ‘Open’ means that they are visible and can’t be put off by the viewer, and ‘Closed’ means that they can be put on or off as and when the viewer desires.
Video captions are the same as the transcription but are synced to the video’s time codes, permitting the viewers to understand what’s being said in the video.
Top 3 Advantages Of Including Captions In Videos
Apart from making the videos more understandable, captions benefit them much more. Whether it is boosting engagement metrics or search engine optimizations or making videos easily understandable for people with disabilities, video subtitles have a great power to boost your brand’s value.
1. Engagement
Firstly and most importantly, adding subtitles aids in boosting engagement metrics across the board. Read on the following stats to know more:
- Facebook suggests that including captions in your video can increase the view time by around 12 percent.
- During an experiment run by Discovery Digital Networks, it was found that captioned videos received more than 7 percent more views (on an avg).
- A new study saw an increase of 40 percent in the number of views on captioned videos as compared to uncaptioned videos.
- The above-mentioned study also observed that the viewers were 80 percent more likely to watch a video with closed captions till the end.
- Facebook experiences more than 80 percent of the video being watched on mute.
If you ever encounter contradicting statistics, send them to us!
Your videos need to be vibrant and bold to gain viewers’ attention, but sometimes, this is not enough to make your video stand out. In such cases, including words that connect with your viewers makes your video stand apart from the crowd!
2. Accessibility
Looking for another significant benefit of involving subtitles in your video content?
Accessibility is the answer!
More than 28 million adults in America have hearing impairments and rely on captions to understand what’s happening in a video. Without the subtitles, this population would lose out on your content.
Beyond that, if your video is in a specific language, say English, you’re losing out on a very large audience that is not English-speaking. Adding captions in your target language helps you reach your audience around the globe.
3. Search Engine Optimization
Lastly, subtitles can contribute a lot to your SEO efforts. When you add your video’s transcription in the video description, it becomes easy for your content to rank higher in organic SEO results as it facilitates the crawling of the search engine.
Along with adding subtitles in your videos, embed relevant videos on your main web pages, blogs, landing pages, et,c to boost your SEO efforts.
When should Video Captions be used?
Only if you’re using music in your video that isn’t relevant to your video’s content should you consider not using captions. Otherwise be it brand videos, DIY videos, how-to videos, or social videos, captions are mandatorily needed to grab attention on the right channels.
Before posting your video, consider the different distribution methods and audiences’ state of mind to decide whether captions will work.
Use Auto-Generated Captions or Make Your Own?
Captions come in various options, mostly auto-generated by players like YouTube, in pretty white fonts on a black background. But many players allow customizable captions, too, to improve the user experience.
The subtitles can be unreliable as they are often generated by machine learning algorithms, as accepted by YouTube, and cannot always be accurate.
This is why it is advisable to caption the video on your own ensuring the readability and accuracy of the captions. But you can also go for auto-generated captions by checking them before posting for relevance and accuracy. If the auto-generated captions aren’t accurate, write your own to get the best results.
Conclusion
Captions can do a lot to the performance of your video, even if somebody is watching the video on mute or scrolling quickly on the screen. Adding subtitles to a video can bring in a lot of positive results if they’re done with accurate care.
Coupled with beautiful animations or graphics and a great storyline, captions are the last step to put a cherry on the cake and create videos that your audience will love!
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We offer an array of different “Types of Videos” such as Customer Stories, Service Videos, FAQs, Animation Videos, Voice- Over Videos, Animation, all of which will help you leverage your online marketing and help create higher engagement, clicks, calls, opt-ins, and conversion.
Give a call and let us strategize on how we can create the right series of videos that you can utilize with your marketing.
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Mark Wonderlin is the visionary founder of Mosaic Media Films. He is passionate about crafting creative business videos that captivate and convert. Mark and his team stand out by creating visually stunning videos and ensuring they align seamlessly with the client’s broader marketing objectives.