The ultimate guide for subtitling your social media videos
Fast device connections and dependable connectivity have made video content accessible to everyone like never before.
Yet even with these advances, smart content creators know that capturing engagement means ensuring the audience stays interested. It’s one of many reasons why video captions have become so popular among users – helping video content play out with less reliance on audio, or in the viewer’s native language.
Each of the popular video platforms today is capable of enriching the video content you publish on them with subtitle and caption support.
Therefore, the question isn’t whether or not you should add subtitles and captions to your video content – but rather, how best to go about it for the most optimal results?
Why add subtitles to your social media videos?
In a world in which user attention spans are being ever more accosted by ever more distractions, ensuring your content isn’t lost in the noise is absolutely pivotal. Fortunately, effective social media video subtitles can help to achieve that.
Subtitles are a fantastic tool for helping to promote user engagement, drawing the eye and allowing users’ gazes to dwell on what you have to show and tell them that crucial bit longer.
This is true whether you create video on demand (VOD) content, or are a live streamer looking to add captions that convert viewers to your content.
However, as we will explore, there are more reasons to add subtitles to your video content than you might think.
1. Makes your video content inclusive for all
Accessibility is incredibly important in today’s media landscape – especially with social media so enriched by the wealth of user generated content available.
From viewers overseas to the hearing impaired or simply those who prefer to engage visually, subtitles can add so much to your offering.
2. Optimizes your video for people in sound sensitive environments
It’s important to ensure that viewers can engage with your content, no matter their surrounding audial environment. People watching videos in public rarely do so at volume unless they have headphones – they rely on captions and subtitles accordingly.
Keep in mind also that video content isn’t just entertaining – it can also be informative or central to marketing. That means professional LinkedIn video subtitles or subtitles for Twitter videos is a pivotal part of any brand growth strategy.
Remember, the goal is not to use subtitles and transcripts to replace or overcome the sound design moxie of your video content – merely to enhance it. The ideal video for today’s market is one that can be enjoyed with or without the audio element – something good subtitles can help you to accomplish.
3. Creates a global presence for maximizing views
Even decades into mainstream internet access, it remains inspiring and overwhelming just how far your video content can reach – corners of the world you never even dreamed of connecting with.
Yet connecting with those audiences fully means optimizing your video content with region and country specific subtitles that capture the nuance and idioms of local linguistics.
Even platforms as relatively straightforward as Instagram will benefit from language subtitles.
4. Grabs attention and simplifies comprehension
Whether there are complications in some of your viewers’ hearing, or the speakers in a given video have an accent or dialect with which certain viewers are unfamiliar, subtitles in social media videos help to enhance understanding that overcomes any boundaries.
Naturally, people engage more with videos that appeal to their attention in this way, making it far more likely that they will see your videos through for those valuable viewership figures and marketing conversions.
Viewers bounce off videos that are too complex, absorb too much time with uninteresting information, or that simply don’t seem to convey what they mean in the same way that they themselves do.
For these reasons, ensuring you have the added layer of comprehension that written subtitle content can provide can prove a powerful ally in keeping your users locked into viewership.
5. Enhances SEO ranking with caption indexing
Even the most experienced marketers and content creators can fall into the trap of regarding SEO as some arcane art, the rules for which are ever changing and ever more difficult to distinguish.
In reality, SEO is simply about making good content more viable to more people when searching for advice or entertainment. Accessibility plays a massive role in that, especially internationally in other languages – and that means optimizing your videos for SEO is made that much easier with effectively subtitled content.
6. Increases engagement and video performance
How are your metrics looking these days? Content creators exist in an innately competitive landscape, where both proactivity and reactivity shape the trends and terms most searched for by audiences worldwide.
Put simply, subtitles help your video stand out – especially in news feeds and web page embeds where content plays silently, but automatically, to complement the likes of written articles or featured posts.
Subtitles and captions on your video content can help your creations not only stand apart for their high production values and global appeal, but also the ways in which they harmonize with other content types online.
Transform your audio and
video to text and subtitles
- High accurate, on demand service
- Competitive pricing with the fastest turnaround using AI
- Upload, search edit and export with ease.
Social media captions: the platforms that need them most
Social media is far from static these days, and as a primary way for people to connect through technology, the efficacy of video content cannot be understated.
In reality, there simply is not a platform for which captions and subtitles don’t enhance your content. Well-established video platforms such as YouTube can take advantage of subtitles for both international appeal and to stand out from the crowd – while Instagram stories and LinkedIn videos can help enhance any brand’s reputation among the community when you’re building brand trust.
How to create SRT files yourself from scratch
At the basic building block level, even the most effective video transcripts and subtitles are often added to video content via SRT files. At face value, these are relatively easy to create.
That’s because it’s often simply a case of creating text files that match the speech taking place in a video, and ensuring the relevant written content is timestamped accordingly so as to match the video during playback.
Of course, this is no insubstantial amount of work – and creating video content is often a time intensive pursuit to begin with. Naturally, any content creator is free to pursue creating their own SRT files, but in an industry as fast moving as this, there is a lot to be said for entrusting such capabilities to external partner expertise.
How to get captions and translated subtitles with Amberscript
Processing video content in any way takes time – from scripting and establishing the filming location, through to shots, editing and compiling the data for release.
Consequently, even though there are compelling advantages to creating captions and subtitles for video content on social media, it’s understandable that it can be yet another large task to add onto any project.
At Amberscript, we have years of expertise in working with video content creators of all kinds – from all corners of the world and creative backgrounds. Through this experience, we have created flexible and proven methods of adding subtitles for internationalization or captions for enhanced engagement to a wide range of video content.
Whatever your chosen platform and however frequently you want to release new videos, Amberscript is able to work with you in finding the best ways to add subtitles to video content.
Amberscript automatic subtitles
Using advanced speech recognition AI technologies and developed to rapidly create transcriptions and translated subtitles for all kinds of video content, Amberscript’s automatic subtitles are a popular choice.
Alongside this automatic video subtitle solution, users are also given the chance to dive into an online text editor to rapidly make any adjustments they feel are necessary.
Naturally, the accuracy of our software is high enough that you hopefully need not bother – but the option is always there to ensure you have accuracy at your fingertips at all times.
Amberscript human-made subtitles
While AI and speech recognition technology has come on in leaps and bounds, there simply is no beating the human touch for grammatical accuracy, attention to details for inflections and nuance, and ensuring complete accuracy in the finished product.
Using the manual subtitle services that Amberscript offers entrusts your video content needs to a specialist who can rapidly, yet accurately, provide fully realized video transcript and subtitle services that are far more precise than most automatic counterparts.
Naturally, this takes a touch longer than the automated strategy for video subtitles – yet it also more readily guarantees accuracy, reducing the need for you to comb over the work again later.
Amberscript translated subtitles
We have made plenty of mentions of going global in today’s article, and with good reason. Letting your video content shine on any social media platform anywhere in the world is not only exciting, but quite literally opens you up to entirely new audiences to convert, appeal to and engage.
Doing so means giving those international audiences the opportunity to engage with what you create in their own native language and on their own terms – even if you’re releasing content into markets where you are confident that English is widely understood.
It’s not just the added accessibility of translated subtitles, after all – but also the gesture of connection you are making simply by offering them. Naturally, local search engines in any given market will also prioritize content that speaks the audience’s language, even if it originated overseas – putting you on powerful competitive footing with domestic content creators and brands from the outset.
Conclusion
The growth of video content worldwide is making it an ever more integral part of any content creation strategy – from hobbyists and videographers through to SMEs, major international brands or simply social media users.
However, competition between video content creators is getting more fierce by the day. To stand apart, even the most casual of content creators needs to demonstrate a commitment to user engagement that can prove daunting at first glance.
Accessibility plays a massive role in smoothing this journey, both for video creators and brands as much as the audiences they intend to attract and captivate. To that end, effective video subtitles for everything from YouTube video essays to TikTok trendsetters and Twitter product announcements need subtitling that connects with the audience effortlessly.
About Amberscript
Amberscript was created by fusing three core principles together – technology, language and science.
Well-established as a partner to both independent content creators and major media outlets worldwide, Amberscript is able to convert audio to text from a variety of sources – not only videos, but also sound files for interviews, podcasts and plenty more.
Believing powerfully that audio ought to be accessible, Amberscript deploys two key strategies to help clients get results. On the one hand are advanced AI and automated translation and transcription systems that can rapidly convert audio to text at scale.
Yet in parallel with this, Amberscript also offers more bespoke, precise and considered manual transcription and international translation support, backed by fluent and native speakers of multiple languages.
With the online world able to unite voices and convey ideas as never before, there is little reason to leave anyone in the dark any longer. From entertainment to vital information, Amberscript can help you reach bigger audiences in short order.