You'll be hard-pressed to find a video on social media that doesn't have captions. That's because most popular platforms, including YouTube, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok, automatically generate captions when users upload videos. Platforms do this because captions give their users a wide range of benefits.
Unfortunately, many creators don't give much thought to their captions after uploading, which could lead to many missed opportunities. That's why, in this post, we'll cover the eight reasons you should use captions with your videos.
These are not captions
I often hear people refer to the styled, animated text that comes up on the screen while someone is talking as captions. However, it's important to note that these aren't true captions. Captions are transcriptions of the audio in the video and are often used as srt andvtt files.
The styled, animated text that's seen across social media is more accurately described as kinetic typography and is a stylistic choice designed to engage viewers. Although there are some shared benefits between kinetic typography and captions, the two serve different purposes.
1. Make your videos accessible
Regarding captions, accessibility is the first thing to consider. According to the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, approximately 15% of American adults (37.5 million) aged 18 and over report some trouble hearing.
Many of these people rely on captions to consume video content, so it's crucial that you ensure your captions, especially the auto-generated ones, are accurate. If not, you could be creating a less inclusive environment and leaving a large audience misguided.
2. Improve comprehension
One study found that including captions in videos can improve overall comprehension. As you can imagine, this improvement is great in a learning environment where students consume video lectures and content.
The same idea applies to other video formats like marketing and documentation videos. Including captions will help viewers follow along with the video and improve their comprehension in the process.
3. Boost SEO and views
Adding captions to your videos gives search engines context when deciphering your video. As mentioned earlier, YouTube and many other platforms automatically create caption files for you, but these files are rarely perfect. That's why it's important for you to review the automatically generated captions and make changes as needed.
Many companies go a step further and include their captions as transcripts within the blog post. As you'll see later, some video hosting solutions have a feature that makes it possible to search captions, but by including transcripts within the blog post, you're making it even easier for people to search your videos.
This American Life, a wildly popular weekly public radio program and podcast, found a 4.36% increase in inbound traffic and a 6.68% increase in search traffic attributable to transcripts. With tools like Descript, which can help you export captions as formatted text, it's easier than ever before to include transcripts in your blog posts.
4. Keep viewers engaged
If one of your business goals is to improve your video SEO, you must keep viewers engaged. That's because platforms like YouTube use both average view duration and average percentage viewed as signals to inform ranking.
As discussed in the previous section, captions can help your search rankings. Therefore, higher-ranked videos will be more relevant to the target audience and lead to better engagement metrics because they're more relevant to the user's search query.
Also, some publications have found that nearly 85% of their viewers watch videos on mute. And Facebook found that captions increased viewership for video ads by 12%. In other words, there's plenty of evidence that many users enjoy watching videos on mute, so it's important that you cater to this audience if you want your video engagement to perform well.
5. Increase global reach
Platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok have a massive global reach, and you can tap into this audience by providing subtitles for your videos. Yes, subtitles, which are different than captions. Let me explain.
Captions assume the user cannot hear the audio in the video, while subtitles assume the user can hear the audio but not understand the language. In other words, captions are associated with accessibility, and subtitles are associated with translation.
Once you ensure your captions are accurate, you can easily translate them into any language you want. There are tools that do this automatically, but my personal recommendation is to find native speakers on sites like Upwork and hire them to do the translations.
6. Simplify search and user experience
Have you ever gone back to a video you watched before and wished you could find a specific moment in the video? Wouldn't it be nice if you could search the video and find what you wanted? Well, some video solutions, like Vimeo, have the ability to search transcripts. Then, once you find what you're looking for, you can start playing the video from that specific spot.
This feature is especially useful for long videos, like podcasts or webinars, but I'm sure many viewers aren't aware that this is possible. However, it's always a welcomed site when I see this available for videos because it greatly improves my overall experience.
7. Streamline use with AI
For many content creators, including myself, the topic of AI isn't always positive. However, after giving AI a shot over the past several months, I've found a lot of practical use cases for using captions with AI tools like ChatGPT.
One use case is to let ChatGPT summarize longer videos, like webinars or tutorials. You could also ask ChatGPT to provide an outline of the video and use that outline to generate video chapters. Recently, YouTube has been generating automatic chapters for videos, which is a great way for viewers to find certain parts of the video.
However, always double-check the accuracy of these AI outputs. Although the tech is extremely impressive, it's not always right.
8. Reach compliance standards
There are several US laws and organizations that regulate captioning. For example, the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a comprehensive anti-discrimination law that specifically protects the rights of individuals with disabilities. Titles II and III of the ADA significantly impact web accessibility and closed captioning.
It is important to note that both titles include a provision that allows organizations to claim an "undue hardship" in providing certain accommodations. This provision often becomes the central point of contention in ADA lawsuits regarding the closed captioning requirement.
Other laws include Section 508 & Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. Also, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulates all forms of interstate and international communications in the United States of America, which includes television, radio, and internet services. The purpose is to oversee communication stands across all these platforms and ensure adherence.
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Conclusion
First and foremost, we should all strive to make our content as inclusive and accessible as possible, and captions can help us do that. Beyond that, captions allow us to reach a larger audience, improve engagement, boost SEO, and much more.
If you need help with your video strategy, including captions and subtitles, be sure to introduce yourself. We help SaaS companies create tailored video solutions to grow their businesses, and we look forward to exploring how we can help yours.