How To Use Video Captions To Attract And Engage Users

Video is taking the marketers by storm like a champion when it comes to attracting and engaging internet users. More than half a billion watch Facebook videos every day and around one-third of all online activities include watching the video. There’s no doubt left about how powerful video content actually is but what can be done as a marketer to render your video content more effective in reaching the right audience at the right time.

One sure shot method of boosting your video’s power is..to add CAPTIONS!

As disappointing as it may sound, most of our partners do not even consider adding subtitles while creating a video. It sure is a shame because captions are low-key one of the easiest ways to improve your video.

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 make it clear what’s being spoken in the view and can be classified as Open or Closed. ‘Open’ meaning that they are visible and can’t be put off by the viewer and ‘Closed’ meaning 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 in a much bigger way. 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 of boosting 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 the 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 happen to come across contradicting statistics, send them to us!

Your videos need to be vibrant and bold to gain viewers’ attention but sometimes, not just this is 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 major 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 going on in a video. Without the subtitles, this part of the 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 webpages, blogs, landing pages, etc 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 or not.

Use Auto-Generated Captions or Make Your Own?

Captions come in various options, mostly being 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.

Very often, the subtitles can be unreliable as they are 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 prior to posting for relevance and accuracy. If the auto-generated captions aren’t accurate, write your own to get the best of 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 absolutely love!