The days of overwhelmingly long Facebook posts and blog articles are gone. In modern times, video has taken over as the most common way of consuming content. Due to this change, subtitles became one of the main points of interest and debates regarding their overall usefulness. As it turns out, they can be a lot more helpful than you might think – here’s why.
Three Reasons Why You Should Add Subtitles
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Accessibility
- For the hearing impaired
Video by itself is nothing more than a series of moving pictures – audio gives it meaning and purpose. Unfortunately, more than 6% of the world’s population suffers from disabling hearing loss, with high chances of the percentage doubling in the coming years. All of these people are potential audience, which is why it’s in your best interest to provide them with an alternative way of consuming your content. With subtitles, you establish a trusting relationship by showing them that you care and that they won’t have to miss any important part of the action
- For the foreigners
Subtitles themselves are a form of captioning which usually implies a translation to a different language. This is especially important if your audio is not in English, since that’s a large amount of people that you won’t be able to reach. Try to determine your audience group, get some statistics on the parts of the world from which they come from and put your primary focus on those languages. You’ll probably be surprised by the results.
2. Engagement
If you take a look at any viral video, it almost certainly comes with subtitles included. There’s a good reason for that – almost 65% of Facebook video views come from foreign speakers, and over 80% of videos are watched without sound. You can also take into account the fact that many foreigners do not have time to understand speech, this is why subtitles for them are a very profitable solution. And what about people with hearing deceases? Or situations in which it is more convenient for a person to read than to listen? Subtitles also increase the likelihood of your content being watched all the way to the end, as well as shared further.
In addition to that, it’s a lot easier to catch the viewer’s attention when you have a written representation of the audio. Even if they’re in a public place where they can’t unmute the video, chances are a lot higher that they’ll stick around when they see the subtitles.
3. SEO Boost
Search engines, such as Google’s, can’t recognize speech or video – they work exclusively with text. When someone looks up a specific subject, these engines return the results which most closely resemble it according to the clicks of previous people who ran a similar search. However, when you add subtitles to a video, the algorithms are able to analyze the text and find matching keywords. This makes it much more likely for people to stumble upon your video, after which it’s up to you to engage them.
- Use Video Transcripts & Captions
In order to start implementing captions, you’ll first have to convert all that audio to text. The easiest way to do this is by getting a transcription. Video transcripts naturally come with timestamps and speaker labels, which is quite convenient since all you have to do afterwards is sync the two files together. Ideally, you should strive to do as little editing as possible in order to keep up with your video production speed.
Manual transcription is tedious and hard to do. but there is an alternative. With the help of an automated transcription service, you can get the result in a matter of minutes. Automatic transcription services will do everything for you. And they will do it very quickly. Since an hour of video or audio transcription takes an average of 30 minutes, in some cases even much faster.
You just imagine how one subtitle can improve your content in just half an hour. It remains only to choose a service. On the open spaces of Google you can find a lot of services, but before you pay for something, you should try for free. The Audext service has such an opportunity. Click here for more information. I would like to note that the service has a very convenient interface that is understandable to any person, not even experienced.
Transcribe Videos with Audext.com – A Step-by-Step Guide
- Go to Audext.com and click on the “Start for FREE NOW” button.
- Create an account. You can either do it the old-fashioned way (by entering a name, e-mail and password), or directly through your Google account.
- Go to your dashboard. Here you’ll be greeted by a couple of notifications and buttons. You can see which plan you’re currently using (free/paid), as well as buy credit or edit your profile.
- Upload the file. The dashboard outlines a designated area just for this purpose, alongside the supported formats. Keep in mind that your video shouldn’t exceed 300MB in size and 30 minutes in length (if you’re using the free plan).
- Enter the names of the speakers when prompted. Make sure to add them in order, as this is the way that they’ll appear in your captions.
- Make appropriate edits. Once the transcription starts, you’ll be greeted by this app online editor. Here you’ll be able to monitor the transcription in real-time as well as check the text for errors. Make sure to take advantage of the features such as find & replace, playback rate modifier and the integrated player.
- Export the transcription. Click on the blue “Export” button and choose the text file option.
- Convert it to .SRT file. Use any of the free converters available online, and you’re ready for the final step!
- Connect the files. The easiest way to do this is through a media player or a video editor. These features are pretty self-explanatory. With some social media platforms, you can skip this step since they offer the possibility of uploading the.SRT files directly to the website.
Even though it might seem like a comprehensive process, it’s quite simple. After doing it a few times, it’ll become second nature and you’ll be well on your way towards creating more successful video content.
