How to Easily Add Captions to Your Social Media Videos

When I first started posting videos on social media during the pandemic, I made every mistake there is to make but I stuck with it because videos on social media, particularly LinkedIn, are a powerful way to market yourself and your business today.

Videos on LinkedIn are one of the most underutilized forms of content on LinkedIn, providing major opportunities for you to incorporate them into your social strategy.

LinkedIn videos are effective in getting your followers to stop scrolling on their news feeds.

Short social media videos enable you to convey information and connect with your followers in a way that the written word just doesn’t.

You’re able to capture so much of your personality with videos, which helps you stand out. I stuck with it because a lot of people aren’t using video on LinkedIn or if they are, the videos aren’t great.

After making hundreds of videos, I learned that adding captions to my social media videos made the biggest difference in my audience engagement.

Adding captions to your short social media videos isn’t hard or expensive to do.

Most people scroll their LinkedIn feed on mute, so you’re missing out on a huge audience if you don’t include captions with your videos.

Also, from an accessibility and language standpoint, you should always use them.

I would go as far to say that you shouldn’t post any videos on social media without captions.

In this short video, I talk about the tools I use (right from my smartphone) to add captions very easily to all of my videos.

These tools are pretty easy to use you just have to often go in and edit the captions – which is a great feature – especially since these tools utilize artificial intelligence and voice recognition and almost always misspell something – such as my name like this (Stephanie Moron 🤣).

You can change the colors and fonts of the captions in the tools, and one of them (MixCaptions) even enables you to add your logo, a URL or another watermark to every frame, which is great from a branding and marketing perspective. I also like that you can upload a cover image or slide to start the video.

Here’s how to add captions to a video (of under 10 minutes) using MixCaptions:

• Choose a pre-recorded video from your smartphone
• Select “Captions” at the bottom of the screen to begin your transcription. You can also upload a watermark (to brand your video. Choose the style of caption you want – font color style, size and shading
• Select your language. MixCaption supports 23 languages (English, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Traditional Chinese, Turkish and Vietnamese)
• Then hit “Generate Captions”
• Within a minute or two, your transcribed video is created. Review every frame for errors/odd translations and punctuation errors (trust me on this).
• To edit any section, pause the video and select the pencil icon to make changes to the text. Then hit the green checkmark in the corner to save edits
• You will also want edit the transcript and delete all ”um” “you know” and “like” references (I do it too).
• Save the final video to your phone
• I then upload the video to YouTube and/or social media

CapCut, which comes from the makers of TikTok, works in a similar way but doesn’t have the watermark feature. It’s also free.

In addition there is one little step you should take before you hit save on your video, which is to remove the CapCut logo from the last frame. It’s very easy to do but if you don’t know to do it, it will remain there and you’re essentially advertising for them.

Also, always get a transcript of your videos – you can do that for free by clicking on the dots on the video if you post it on YouTube or use one of the inexpensive transcription services.

I use my transcripts as the basis for blog posts or LinkedIn posts to accompany my videos. It saves me lot of time rather than having to listen carefully to the video playback multiple times and jotting down key points.

You can turn your audio podcasts into videos and share on social media so more users can consume the content.

Also, don’t be afraid to start using video. They really help to connect you with your audience.

I don’t use any fancy tools as you can see here – just my iPhone, a tripod and a Bluetooth remote that only sometimes works.

Feel free to reach out to me if you’d like to talk about either of these tools and how they can work for you.

Also, one of my favorite marketing tips is to use the transcripts from your webinars and podcasts to create additional content from them. Learn how.

Let me know what you think about these caption tools and if you will try them!

https://youtu.be/mNDRW51tjyQ