- Question for all of you to kick this one off:
do you use YouTube captions or subtitles in your videos?
Well, if you don't, here's how to do it and why you should.
- [Announcers] vidIQ, vidIQ, vidIQ.com
- When you are logged into YouTube,
you should see your channel logo in the top
right-hand corner of most YouTube screens.
If you click on that, you have the option
to go to YouTube Studio.
This is currently in beta, but will become
the standard as 2019 progresses.
This is the dashboard, or homepage,
of the new Creator Studio, and to upload captions
you will need to go to videos.
This will show you your most recent videos.
So, for a video that you do have captions for,
click on that video and then
go to the Advanced tab at the top.
In the dead center of the screen,
you should see Subtitles and CC for original video language.
YouTube should usually automatically try and
caption your videos, but it never does a perfect job.
So, if you have gone to the trouble
of captioning your videos, or used a professional service
such as rev.com, you'll have a file that you want
to upload to your video, and you can do it
here with the UPLOAD SUBTITLES/CC link.
Choose whether or not your captions file
has timing or not, and when you click on continue,
it will ask you to upload a file.
The YouTube caption system supports
many different file languages, some of which
you can see on screen now.
For more information, do look at the support page.
A link is in the video description.
Once you select your captions document,
it should automatically add it to the video
where you can press save.
But what if you don't have a captions file
and you want to download the one
automatically created from YouTube?
Well, you can by clicking on the three dots
next to the caption and then selecting Download.
And this will download the file
as an .sbv format to your computer.
Once downloaded, you should be able to
open the file with any type of notepad program
such as Notepad++, and then you can
make changes to it, perfect the grammar,
change the spelling, make sure everything looks right,
and then re-upload it to YouTube
as a perfectly captioned video.
So, why should you use captions
and subtitles in your videos?
Well, first of all, it gives the viewer
a better experience of your content.
To find out just how people used subtitles on your videos,
go to the Creator Studio and then
your channel-wide analytics.
Click on the BUILD AN AUDIENCE tab
and scroll to the bottom, and here you will see
just how many people are at using subtitles.
In our case, 10% of our audience watch videos
with subtitles or captions.
So, we're giving a large portion of our audience
a better experience, and hopefully bringing in
more people who can enjoy our content.
Another thing to remember is that more and more
people are watching YouTube videos via a mobile device,
which means that the listening conditions may not be ideal.
If they're on a busy bus, or out in town
and it's just too much noise, they would prefer possibly
to watch the video with captions and subtitles on.
And finally consider this, with captions,
you can use them for Facebook and Twitter videos,
where the audio is usually turned off
by default when it also plays.
And so, having captions on there helps grab the viewer,
and then they may turn on the audio
and watch the rest of your video.
Now, one thing to bear in mind as I record this video,
there are still features missing from captions
in the new Creator Studio, so you may need
to go back to the Classic Studio to do things
such as full editing on your captions
if that's what you need to do.
In the meantime, if you want a bit of fun,
rewind this video back to the beginning,
turn on captions, but use YouTube's auto translated ones,
because I guarantee you the words
coming out of my mouth will not be
the same ones who are reading down here.
If you want to take your YouTube channel
to the next level then make sure to download vidIQ.
It will help you research YouTube,
analyze videos, order your own channel,
and take actionable steps.
There's a link in the video description.
Make sure to check out our YouTube beginner's guide
playlist over here, and more awesome content,
we'll see you on those videos.
Enjoy the rest of your video making day.