If I were to tell you that doing this one thing where the difference between
getting only 15% of your audience to view your videos versus 85%,
would you try it? I know you are a busy business owner, but your audience,
they're also busy.
They're viewing your short-form videos while they're commuting,
waiting at the doctor's office,
sitting next to their sleeping partner or standing awkwardly in the corner at a
party because they're too overstimulated to be there anymore. The point is,
your videos are getting skipped over by your audience because they can't
comprehend or engage with your content silently. That's the key.
Did you know that most people are watching videos with the sound off?
85% of Facebook videos, 80% of LinkedIn videos,
and 40% of Instagram videos: no sound. So in today's video,
I'm gonna show you how you can build in captions to both your TikTok and your
Reel videos, even if you don't have the Reels caption sticker anymore,
or you never got the automated built-in captions in TikTok.
Here's my workaround that's actually better than using those built-in tools.
First, let's talk Instagram, and even if you're here for TikTok tips,
don't skip this part because what I'm about to show you can be used for both
platforms.
You know when you're filming an Instagram Story and then you realize you don't
have the caption sticker,
and then you realize that your views are gonna be low because people are just
gonna skip over. Yeah, that's me right now. Well,
in today's news coming at you from Barcelona, we've got rain.
No caption sticker. Instead of deleting this Story clip,
what I recommend is for you to go to the three dots, hit save,
save a copy to your camera roll,
and then watch this magic that I'm about to show you.
Here's an example of built-in TikTok captions, which I don't have,
but this is a talking head video and as Natalie is talking,
I can see the words that she's saying. So if I'm watching my phone on silent,
I can still engage with her content and understand what she's saying. Now,
there is no way she's manually typing out all these captions,
the old school way of doing it.
She's got built in TikTok captions. So for me, in my account,
when I go to film a TikTok, this is what it looks like. This is my TikTok,
do I have captions? Then I'm gonna hit the check mark, and then this menu,
if I have captions, it will show here, and I don't see captions.
Sad.
The only option I do have is on the publishing page I can go to
more options and I have this ability to allow auto-generated
captions. So that is something,
but it's not that built-in look like we saw in Natalie's video.
I did do a little experiment.
I posted a video where I was talking and I turned on those auto captions,
but I didn't get them for a full 24 hours. So keep that in mind.
Still use that feature,
but it might be a day or two before you actually see those captions populating.
Let's say you're making a Reel. So you are going to go into the plus area,
go to Reel, then you are going to record something. This is my Reel.
Do I have captions? Then you're gonna go to next,
and then you are going to go to the square face, the sticker icon,
and if you have the caption sticker, you'll see it there. As you can see,
I do not. So we are going to redo this Reel.
I'm going to X out of this and hit start over,
and I'm gonna go into one of the effects, and this is going to give me captions.
It's like I have captions, but not really, so I don't understand Instagram.
Right on this menu here where it says effects next to the sparkly icon,
you're gonna tap that. Then you are gonna go to the magnifying glass icon,
you're gonna type in "caption." Now,
currently there are three caption stickers built by Instagram. Again,
why don't I have the actual caption sticker? I don't know.
But you can see there's one called Comic, Mumble and Bubble.
So if you tap on any one of these,
you can see that it says Comic Captions by Instagram.
Okay? So you want the ones that are made by Instagram.
Now I'm gonna tap on this and I'm gonna again film my reel.
Do you ever get the feeling that someone is following you? Now,
I'm gonna hit next and my captions are going to appear. And look,
I have captions. If I wanna use this in my Reel,
I can hit next and go on to publish.
Or let's say I wanna use this in my Instagram Stories.
Hit the downward button in the upper menu,
and I'm just gonna save this clip to my camera roll.
Now I can post this clip to my Stories, to my TikTok,
to wherever the heck I want.
Now let's go back because this is a bit of a wild filter,
and let's go back into effects and choose Bubble caption.
This is probably my favorite one. Get ready with me as I film a Reels tutorial.
Now, I was holding down my thumb there to record,
don't see the captions yet until I hit next,
and now these captions are gonna autogenerate. And again,
if I wanna post this to my Story, so it only lives for 24 hours,
I'm just gonna hit this downward button at the top,
and now I've saved a copy to my camera roll. Or if I wanna post it as Reel,
I'm gonna hit next, and now I'm in the Reels publishing screen.
So I'm going to my camera roll,
and you can see here that my two clips are saved with the captions built in,
thank you very much. So it's like Instagram has the functionality,
but just won't give it to me for some reason. Okay,
so that's a quick workaround on how you can get built-in Instagram captions.
But what about TikTok? When it comes to TikTok and Instagram,
I want you to download a totally separate app called CapCut.
So let me go into CapCut right now.
So here I am inside of CapCut and it doesn't look like much to be honest,
but there's a lot of powerful features right here.
So the very first thing I want you to do is hit expand right at the top,
and you're gonna see some new features like auto cut and prompter.
Prompter is magic for your talking head tip videos.
So I'm gonna show you this real quickly. Tap prompter,
and you can see here that I had preloaded a script that I'd like to
say in my talking head video.
So you can hit the icon here to edit or paste in your script,
you can use the icon in the bottom right to change your
speed, to change your font size, and then the left icon is to drag it around.
But I recommend to keep your prompter as high as possible because your camera is
right at the top of your phone usually. So let me show you how this works.
I'm just gonna hit the green record button,
and I don't even have to memorize lines, it's amazing. Here we go.
All the ways I've been cringe, I'm seeing this topic on TikTok a lot,
and looking back on my history, I think it's a hundred percent true.
I've made myself cringe when I put my name forward as a marketing rockstar to a
friend, but booked in my first freelance client. Alright,
so you can see that we're taken into this screen right away to edit it.
So we have these edit functions right here, or we can save it as is.
Now I wanna edit it because the whole point of this is to add captions, right?
We use the prompter to say our script in one take,
but now I wanna add captions.
So you can either hit captions on the right hand side or go to edit in the
bottom left. So let's hit captions. And you can see right away,
I am being prompted to create auto captions. Yes, this is what I want,
my language is English, so then I'm just gonna hit start,
I usually don't touch any other settings,
and now CapCut is doing the caption work for me.
So you can see all the captions are right below and they're built in. Now,
there's a few more steps you wanna take to edit your captions.
So generally you wanna make sure that they're high enough up on your screen so
that they're not gonna be blocked by any features down here.
Both TikTok and Instagram have features down here,
so you want to make them pretty central and high.
You can also pinch this box to make it a bit smaller.
And the other thing you wanna do is hit batch edit down in the bottom.
This is where you're gonna see all of those auto-generated captions,
and this is where you're also going to make any edits in case the caption
tool got your words wrong, but I honestly find it very, very accurate.
Then in this window,
you can go to style and you can see you have some options to change the color of
your captions or add a background. But honestly,
I'm gonna take you through another way to make captions,
it gives you a bit more options.
So I'm just gonna hit save on this and you can see now that project is
saved right underneath this section of the app, so I didn't lose anything. Now,
let's say you film something within CapCut,
or you film something within your camera app, which p.s.,
I highly recommend because you're gonna be able to pull in any clip and
add captions. So if you wanna film in CapCut, that's totally fine.
It's not going to pixelate or compress your video,
just like TikTok and Reels do after you post them.
So if I wanna film in the app, I'm gonna go to camera,
and you can see down here I have the option to go to my album and I can upload
something that I've already filmed. So if I want to upload this one,
let's say I filmed this from my camera roll, I can say import edit,
now there's no captions, right?
So I'm going to go to text and then I'm going to hit auto captions,
and voila, our favorite feature is right there.
We're gonna hit start and auto-generate these captions,
and it's kind of the same process.
So you're going to tap on these auto-generated captions. Again,
you might wanna move these up and pinch them in. Go to batch edit,
and this is where you are going to do any of your editing.
I actually like to break up my captions to make them not a huge long sentence.
So I like to make every caption two to three words.
So I just move my cursor to after "three tips to," then I'm gonna hit return
and CapCut is automatically going to find the right point
in the video to display that caption so that it still matches with what I'm
saying. It's really quite magic.
So basically the captions and my mouth will always be in sync even though I'm
breaking up these long sentences. Okay, so I'm just hitting return,
and now I'm gonna get much shorter captions, so I'm gonna hit the check mark.
You can see here they're much shorter. Let me make it bigger so you can see it.
So to make it bigger, I'm just literally dragging the corners of this box. Now,
we can also go to style,
and you can see here in this window we have a lot more style options,
and my favorite easiest style to choose is the first white "T" with
the black outline or the black "T" with the white outline. As you can see,
this is very similar to the style you see on TikTok, but for some of us,
we don't have this built-in caption style for whatever reason.
So I'm gonna choose this one and I'm gonna hit the check mark.
And the cool thing is,
is that I don't have to choose every single caption
clip to make this edit.
CapCut applies that style to every single clip, right? So same thing,
if I just choose this first clip and I move it around and I center it,
then all of them get the same treatment. So huge time saver,
so you're not having to go into each single one one at a time. Okay,
so this is another way that I added captions. I uploaded a video,
and there it is, it's built right in. Now take a look at the end.
Did you see what CapCut did? They snuck in a bit of a promo right at the end.
So when you use the auto caption tool, this will populate.
You need to make sure you go to the very end of your clip, select it,
and then hit delete, okay? I believe I have a paid version of CapCut,
that's why there's no CapCut watermark,
so you might be seeing a watermark when you do export your file.
So just keep that in mind. If you like this app, it might be worth the upgrade.
So let's say this is ready to go. I'm not gonna post it in CapCut,
but I'm going to save a copy from CapCut. So hit the arrow in the upper right,
I'm exporting it, and this is the real power of CapCut.
I'm gonna hit done, but if I go back to my camera roll,
now I have a high res raw version of that
clip that, guess what? I can post this to TikTok,
I can post this to Instagram, I could post it to YouTube shorts,
I could post it everywhere,
and it's not being compressed because it was already posted on one of those
profiles. If you know, you know. So this is the power of CapCut. Now,
like I said earlier, CapCut is so powerful.
You have the option to film in the app or film in your phone's camera app.
So to film in the app, you're just gonna hit camera, choose 60 seconds,
and then you're going to hit that green button and you're gonna go ahead and
film. If you earned a thousand dollars today, right now,
what would you do with it? I'm just coming up with a hook on the fly. Okay,
so let's say that's my clip,
hit the check mark and then I'm gonna go into edit.
So instead of tapping on captions on the right hand menu,
I'm gonna go into edit.
And this is gonna take me into the more robust editing page.
So I'm gonna go again to text, I'm gonna again hit auto captions, hit start,
it's going to generate them for me, and you know the deal now.
You know how to bring in captions to your video. So again,
anytime you export,
it's automatically gonna be saved to this edit column or your camera column
right there. And bonus, another bonus from CapCut.
You have the ability to edit these videos on your desktop.
So you can see here that CapCut is prompting me saying, this is a large project,
edit it on CapCut desktop for a better experience.
So you can just from your phone, upload a video, upload a project,
then tap upload,
and you can choose which of your TikTok accounts to upload it to.
So you can hit upload. Now it's gonna upload,
and now when I sign into CapCut on my desktop,
I'm gonna have this video file ready to edit.
So much time-saving magic with this app. Now that you know my captions hack,
make sure that you're not going through all this effort to make videos to
attract your target audience, but then actually repel them away with your bio.
Watch this video next.