How To Add Captions & Subtitles To A Twitter Video?

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a popular social media platform that makes it easy for individuals and brands to connect with their audiences. Users primarily communicate through short 280-character messages called ‘tweets.’ However, Twitter supports other forms of media such as photos, audio, and video.

Video is one of the best ways for your brand to reach your audience through Twitter. Unlike the text in tweets, there are no limits on the length of videos. While we love short and snappy content, sometimes it’s easier to communicate through longer and more personal media.

How can adding closed captions to your Twitter video increase engagement?

Adding closed captions to your Twitter videos is more than just functional. Captions and subtitles are proven to improve engagement and boost the performance of videos across social media platforms.

Here are some ways you’ll benefit from adding closed captions and subtitles to your videos:

Improves accessibility 

Closed captions make your Twitter videos more inclusive. It makes it possible for those who are deaf or hearing impaired to enjoy your content. Inclusivity and accessibility tend to fall to the wayside for many brands. But having accessible content is important and helps you overreach a larger user base! Without captions, you could be missing out on connecting with millions of Twitter users around the world.

When it comes to accessibility make sure your captions are more than just summaries of the audio. You should be captioning every word, so users can enjoy the exact same experience as those watching with audio.

Better user experience

Most social media users tend to watch videos without sound. This is particularly true for a platform like Twitter, where the primary medium is text.

If users are silently browsing their Twitter feeds, they’re more likely to engage if the captions provide some context for the video. Otherwise, the video might make no sense or seem less interesting. As a result, they’ll scroll past your video without a second thought.

80% of consumers say they’re more likely to finish a video if there are captions available.  Instead of forcing your audience to turn on their audio, make it easy for them to enjoy the video without it.

Help your videos stand out

Your audiences have never been more stimulated. We’re all being bombarded with content from the moment we wake in the morning. This doesn’t just include Twitter, we’ve got platforms like Tiktok and Instagram making it possible to scroll through endless amounts of videos and information.

On average, you have three seconds to capture the attention of a user. By adding captions, you have more than just the visuals to help generate immediate interest in your Twitter video. Once you’ve captured their interest, they’re more likely to complete and engage with your video.

Easier to understand

From audio to visuals, sometimes there’s a lot going on in a video. Maybe there are several voices talking at once. Perhaps you’re using a lot of technical terms.

Twitter captions provide an alternative way for users to absorb your content. Many users find it easier to understand the information they read versus through audio. Even the simplest of videos can benefit from captions to improve understanding. The more users understand your content, the more likely they are to engage, share, or re-watch.

Not only do captions improve comprehension, they also improve retention. Adults are more likely to remember brand names when videos include subtitles or captions.

Optimize for the algorithm

Many platforms have machine learning that helps the algorithm understand the audio and visual effects of a video. This is how they know who to best show your video to. You can help Twitter (and other platforms) understand your video through captions.

This can also help search engines, like Google, index your content. They’ll crawl your captions for relevant keywords and phrases to display your video to relevant users.

Many social platforms have denied that captions have any impact on results and rankings. However, Twitter video captions are still an effective way to ensure your videos are reaching the right audiences. You can also optimize your titles, descriptions, and title tags to boost your performance.

However, remember that closed captions and subtitles are tools to improve your Twitter videos. You should be using them as intended – to caption your videos. Do not use them to stuff keywords or add irrelevant information. This will create a poor experience for your audience and leave them feeling frustrated.

Steps for adding closed captions to a Twitter video

Once you’re ready to upload closed captions to a Twitter video, you’ll first need to generate the captions. Once you have a file with the accurate time stamps and subtitles, you can upload this to Twitter.

Sounds complicated? Adding closed captions to your Twitter videos is actually easier than you might think. Instead of spending hours subtitling your videos, you can get your captions through Amberscript.

Amberscripts does the heavy lifting so you can have accurate subtitles with minimal time and effort.  Here’s how you can add captions and subtitles to your Twitter video with the help of Amberscript.

1.   Upload your video to Amberscript

Once your video is ready to go, you can upload it to Amberscript in just a few clicks.

2.   Generate captions for Twitter with Amberscript

We offer two ways for you to generate captions for your Twitter videos. You can use our Automatic subtitles service or our Manual subtitles service.

Automatic subtitles:

Once you upload your video, our speech recognition engine creates a first version of your captions. This could save you up to 10x the time it would take to caption it yourself.
Automatic subtitles are a quick and budget-friendly way to generate captions for your Twitter videos.

Manual subtitles:

For more serious and technical videos, choose our Manual subtitles service. Manual subtitles take a bit longer but offer up to 100% accuracy. One of our language experts will perfect and quality-check your captions before delivering your files. We can also translate your subtitles to help you reach an even larger audience.

3.   Customize the caption

Amberscript’s AI and speech recognition software is extremely accurate. You can expect your captions to be pretty close when it comes to text and time alignment.

However, everyone makes mistakes from time to time (even computers!). When using Amberscript’s automatic subtitle service, you’ll be able to make any necessary edits before downloading your files. This includes fixing any spelling errors for any proper nouns or adjusting the time stamps. You’ll also be able to add custom captions. Our online text editor makes it easy for you to preview your video and make any changes.

Amberscript Manual subtitles go through several quality checks, so there is no need for any detailed editing. However, if you want to polish the final captions, you can still do so using our online editor.

4.   Download the finalized video and upload to Twitter

Once you’ve finalized your captions, Amberscript will generate a caption file for you to download. For Twitter, the best file format is SRT.

When uploading your video to a Tweet, you’ll be able to select ‘Upload caption file’ directly below the video. Upload your Amberscript .srt file. Once you’re happy with your text and video, you can publish your Tweet.

Another option for adding captions and subtitles to a Twitter video is to download your video with embedded captions. However, this method means Twitter may not be able to scan for keywords within your videos.

You can find up-to-date information on uploading caption files to a Tweet here.

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Creating content for your social media channels is time-consuming. Prioritizing captions and subtitles can feel like a challenge. However, closed captions and subtitles are one of the easiest ways to improve the performance of your Twitter videos.

Amberscript makes it easy for you to get accurate captions, quickly and at an affordable price. So you can spend more time engaging with your audience, instead of writing captions.