Why should you add closed captioning or subtitles to your social media videos?
And how do you actually do it? I'm gonna answer that right now!
First up why, why would you add closed captioning?
Hopefully I don't need to take very long to sell you on
this: we're in the age of mobile. And wherever you are most likely you don't
want to hear the video, as you're scrolling through your feed. And having
closed captioning immediately grabs your viewers attention and say: "Wow, this video
is actually kind of interesting, let me continue watching and reading along with
them". And then they may or may not actually then click on the sound to hear
the full experience. So having video on social, almost basically requires closed
captioning. Along with SEO benefits, meaning allowing
search engines to know what's actually in your video is a big benefit. Now
there's two styles: one is the native. Both YouTube and Facebook have the
ability where closed captioning you can turn on and off. Or another version is
called a hard embed, meaning it's not actually the choice by Facebook or
YouTube. You put it into the video file when you're doing your editing and
whether Premiere or Final Cut. And you hard embed it into it, so it's always on
and always engaging. And now, that actually works really, well because then people
can't turn it off and they just pulled in. And now with social being generally
not vertical video, people aren't usually turning their phone sideways, they turn
it upright and you create a video sort more Instagram style which is a square, 4
by 3, or of the full length of the of your phone. It gives you room, you keep
your video, you record it like this video, which is 16 by 9 widescreen. And you put
it in the middle and then you have the subtitles going beneath it's, you don't
actually have to cover up any of your video. So it keeps people engaged but
they still can see the entire experience. So it works really well for social, wether
they're hard embedded or the native file. So now how do you go about actually
getting the closed captioning or subtitle into your video? There's
actually a closed captioning file called SRT, and that's the most common one
that's used online and you can actually create it in a many
different ways. There's freeways and paid ways, of course. The free and simplest way
is YouTube. They actually allow you to create and download SRT files
very easily. They have an automatic captioning tool where you just upload
your video and it'll try to figure out what you're saying and create an SRT
file off of that. And you can actually go in and change it, modify and fix it
because it's about 60% to 80% right. Usually more on the 60%
right and they're getting better. But the other way, which is really cool
that YouTube offers is if you read a script, word-for-word and you have that
file, those word-for-word files, you copy that text put it into YouTube into this
other area click Sync, and it'll figure out when you set that word, line
everything up nicely and provide you an SRT file. And then you can download it
from YouTube and then use that on Facebook or wherever else. So it's not
just on YouTube that you can utilize it, so that's really really handy. Now if you
don't, if you didn't have a word-for-word script, it was more lecture style
like this one you had just bullet point. So you did an interview and you didn't
manually write it out, there's a couple tools to transcribe it for more free
actually. IBM Watson, I came across this recently and it's kind of old they have
a little tool online, a demo that you can upload an audio file and it'll
transcribe it automatically. Another tool out there that I just came across, I
think it's pretty cool, it's an app called Otter and it's usually meant for
transcribing meeting notes so then you can go back and read it, which is pretty
cool in itself, but you can then grab that text file that automatically
transcribes, put it back into YouTube and have it automatically synced. Now both
IBM and Otter, you'll probably still want to go through and make sure it's
accurate but it's a free way to maybe, especially if it's a longer video that
you've got, that you want to create that subtitle file and you don't want to
do it manually, going through and typing every single word. Now another free tool
is Facebook Ads. If you're actually doing a video ad, an option they offer
is to create automatic closed captioning and have them reviewed it for accuracy,
which is great. The only downside, as far as I believe you can't download that SRT
file from Facebook and use it anywhere else. So if you're only gonna put it on
Facebook then there's a free way to get your
closed captioning. Well, "free". Technically you have to still pay Facebook for the ad
but you get the point. Now if you didn't want to do manually,
check it or do that any of this, and you didn't have, you didn't save word for word
script and you can't just automatically transcribe in YouTube,
there's paid tools out there, paid platforms services and the one that we
use is Rev. This is not a paid promotion for them, I
just, we just use them, we like them, it's $ 1 per minute, very simple and they
make sure it's accurate, and it comes up at the right time. And then they just
give you that SRT file that you can upload to Facebook or YouTube. Another
paid tool to take a look at is Speed Scriber, just came across this site, seems
to be an interesting mix of automated but with some machine learning built in.
Lots of good buzzwords but take a look at it, if you're interested.
Now again, Facebook and YouTube are where it allows you to upload the SRT file
natively and then have it engaged or people can disengage it. YouTube is
usually I think disengaged, unless people engage it. Facebook is usually the closed
captioning is engage because I know most people don't watch it. But if you want it
hard embedded, which right now I believe LinkedIn and Twitter don't support that
native subtitles, you have to hard embed it if you want that to happen you need
to do that in your editing stage, whether it's in Premiere or Final Cut. We use
Final Cut 10 and there's actually a plugin for Final Cut 10. I'm sure there's
one for Premiere as well that you can then import that SRT file and
automatically create all the words, you don't have to mainly be typing in
all the words and you can change the font, the size, the color and again
probably in social you gonna do in a square format so that it fills more the
screen, and then you have the subtitles beneath your video so doesn't cover up
anything and that works really well. Please subscribe and also hit the little
bell icon if you're on YouTube to get notified the next time we upload a video.
I'm Alex with Your Local Studio, I'll see you next time!