If you’re not using video content on your social media channels you’re missing out on engaging with your audiences through a very effective medium where they get to really know you.
You can make all the videos in the world but if you don’t engage with your audience and make your content as accessible as possible you won’t really be using them effectively.
In this video, I explain why you need to include captions on all of your social media video content.
Did you know that most people watch videos without the sound on so you’re missing out on a huge potential audience if you don’t include captions.
In addition, viewers in an open office or in public can engage better with the content without having to reach for headphones.
Video captions drive more social engagement. Simply adding captions to video content drives up clicks, overall view time and view longevity.
Many people don’t (or can’t) turn on video sound. As much as 85% of Facebook videos are played without sound. That means, if you don’t have captions on your video, it could be skipped by anyone watching with the mute button on, which could be a sizable chunk of your target audience.
Captions also boost comprehension, memory and attention. Captions aren’t the same as subtitles, but they can help foreign language speakers, if your language isn’t their first language, captions help overcome the challenges of accent and dialect.
They let viewers know what the video is about, giving them a reason to tap and turn on the sound and listen.
Social media video has stopping power. Movement is more visually prominent than still images. And images are more prominent than text.
Adding captions, subtitles or a transcript to videos allows Google to index the entirety of video content, rather than just indexing the video title.
Captions and subtitles also make the content more accessible to those who don’t have their volume on and the 37.5 million Americans who are deaf or hearing impaired.
There are many online tools that make it easy to add captions to your content such as Camtasia, CapCut and even Instagram (you can download a story after adding captions to it).
Take the time to add captions to your social media to enhance visibility and reach of your video content.