Facebook Captioning: Increase Viewership, Ensure Accessibility
Captioning your video content not only ensures its compliance with accessibility requirements for deaf and hard-of-hearing viewers, but it also boosts your content’s effectiveness. Captions help improve your video’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) score, with stats showing that a webpage with video stands a greater chance of being near the top of an online search result.
However, SEO programs often can’t “read” video content unless it also contains some sort of text that can be indexed. By adding captions, you essentially are embedding transcripts of your content in the video file’s metadata, pulling all the video’s searchable keywords to the forefront and, in the process, boosting your search rankings.
Also, adding captions to videos — as many schools, businesses, and government agencies have discovered — has been shown to make the content more engaging and improve retention for all viewers, not just those requiring accessible content.