There are more than 3.5 billion people using social media, with some estimates finding that 11 new people use social networking sites for the first time every second.
Not surprisingly, video plays a huge role in social media and in the lives of social media users. Statistics show that 78% of people watch online videos every week, and 55% view online videos every day. It’s estimated that by 2022, online videos will make up more than 82% of all consumer internet traffic (that’s nearly 15 times higher than it was in 2017).
This increase in the consumption of online video content creates a new challenge for you when you want to share videos. It’s important that you make sure they are accessible to all friends, family, and followers. Thankfully, adding captions to videos posted on social media goes a long way toward making them inclusive for all.
Captioning your social media video immediately makes it accessible to audiences who would not otherwise be able to enjoy your content, including the nearly 50 million Americans in the deaf and hard-of-hearing community. Add to that an ever-growing number of Americans who view content in places where it’s impossible to hear the audio — on mass transit, in a busy restaurant, on a noisy gym treadmill, or the library — and the number of people who rely on captions grows substantially larger.
In addition, captions help viewers more closely follow along with your video’s dialogue, more effectively understand your content when they don’t speak your native language, and stay more engaged and keep eyes on your video longer (a real benefit for businesses and social media marketers).
Just as each social media platform has its own unique way to post content, they also differ in the ways captions can be integrated.
Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube provide options for uploading closed captions. Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat require you to encode captions/text directly in the video file. This means the captions are “burned” on the video and always appear as part of the content (they cannot be turned on or off).
Most platforms offer options for users to add their own captions. In some cases, this can be relatively simple, but most times it can be a time-consuming and tricky process. This is especially true with longer videos, music clips, or videos that feature multiple speakers and quick, back-and-forth discussions. At VITAC, we can help you save time and aggravation, while providing assurance that your social posts are accurate and inclusive. We can help make your life easier.
Below are just a few of the ways that captions can be added to videos.
We caption both Facebook and Facebook Live video. We’ll work with you to create captions in an .srt (SubRip) file format for Facebook prerecorded videos or help you add captions to all of your Facebook Live video streams.
YouTube gives you the option of letting their own automatic speech recognition (ASR) software automatically add captions to your videos, or users can add their own captions via an .srt file. Youtube captions, though useful in a pinch, often contain errors – wrong words, missing words, spelling mistakes, typos, and no punctuation – which can make it tough to understand and difficult for your viewers to watch. It can also mean lots of editing on your part. We’ll guide you every step of the way to bring captions to all of your prerecorded or live YouTube video content.
LinkedIn users can add closed captioning when sharing a video from their desktop, with the social channel requiring the video contain an .srt file before it can be posted. Captioning can be added to both individual and company page updates.
Instagram and Twitter have some limitations when it comes to captioned video as the platforms do not allow users to add captions to already posted videos. Instead, videos must include encoded captions when they are uploaded. Alternatively, users can upload links to already captioned video, such as those from YouTube or Facebook, to share on these social platforms.
Snapchat allows users to drop basic text over a video or photo, but does not yet allow full captioning. Much like with Instagram and Twitter, users can encode videos with captions prior to sharing on Snapchat. The social platform, however, does have a closed captioning button on its “Discover” section, which features videos from major media producers.
VITAC offers extensive captioning solutions for all of your live and prerecorded video content. Our experts can help create 100% verbatim caption files, perfectly timed to sync with the video’s audio, and placed to match the speakers and action on the screen. Our captions are compatible with all devices, including PC, tablet, and smartphone.
Our live captioners can generate and insert realtime captions into many live social media platforms, and our professional offline captioning experts can create captions for almost any prerecorded video.
With more than 30 years in the captioning and accessibility industry, you can trust us to provide the highest quality captions and adapt our services to fit your needs. We extensively test our technology in multiple customer environments, and our team creates new and innovative captioning solutions as new video platforms hit the market.
Captioning your social media content not only enables you to reach a larger, more inclusive audience, but it also helps make your videos more engaging. At VITAC, we take the stress out of the captioning process.