Subtitling videos on Facebook - Here is why you should subtitle all your videos

2020/ 18/05

Over the past few years, video content has taken over the internet and it is supposed to reach 82% of all consumer internet traffic by 2021, according to a study made by Cisco. At the same time, video consumption habits have changed, for which it is essential to subtitle our videos.

Why should you caption all your Facebook videos?

Grab the attention of users

By captioning your videos, you can get a big advantage over Facebook or other social media content uploaders that don’t use the solution. Video consumption habits are increasingly moving towards watching videos without audio and this is especially true for social media, where 85% of users have automatic video play with the audio turned off. In many cases, silent viewing is justified by the situation (eg.: public transport, waiting in open area), but there are also people who simply prefer silent viewing. Thus, by using captions, you can grab the intention of users scrolling through their Facebook feed more easily, and you will also be able to keep their attention for much longer. According to a Facebook report, the average viewing time of videos could increase by 12% with the addition of subtitles, moreover you can get more people to watch the videos in their entirety. Captions are also thought to increase the liking and sharing rates of the videos.

Boost your social media ads

Due to their effectiveness, visual content is becoming more and more important among the different types of ads. In the everyday information overload, it is much easier to receive and process visual content, of which videos are of paramount importance and require only a minimum amount of concentration from the viewer. The high conversion rate of videos is undeniable, but why can you convert better with captions? As mentioned above, subtitles make it easier to get the attention of users, and this is exponentially true for ads. When creating video ads, marketers usually try to cram relevant content into the first few seconds of the video to take users to the next stage of conversion. By adding captions, this interval of a few seconds can be easily extended so that more information can be communicated to the user and your message also becomes more digestible. Subtitles also make it easier to get users with muted autoplay to view video with sound on.

Think about the hearing impaired

The deaf and hard of hearing make up about 5% of the world’s population and this group is often excluded from online communities due to their hearing impairment. In Hungary, this means approximately 63,000 stakeholders, which is a good reflection of the social usefulness of subtitling.

How can you add captions to Facebook videos?

The first step is to upload the video for the feed you want to share by selecting the option upload image/video. Depending on the length of the video, uploading will take a few minutes and Facebook will notify you when the process is complete. After that, you can enter the title and description of the video, and can also add a location and the name of people in the video. In the same interface, you also have the option to add a caption to the video, which (when Facebook is used in English) offers three options: automatic caption generation, caption writing and caption file upload. In contrast, it is only possible to upload a subtitle file on the Hungarian interface. To do this, you must first create an .srt file that contains timecodes of what is said in the video. Fortunately, the creation of a subtitle file can now be solved with artificial intelligence, which greatly speeds up the process.

How can you subtitle your videos in minutes with artificial intelligence?

Previously, videos were captioned manually. This includes defining time codes and typing what was said in the video, which made the process lengthy and monotonous. However, artificial intelligence solutions are now available that transcribe the videos and also record the timing of specific sentences or words.

One such solution is our Alrite speech recognition solution, which has been optimized specifically for the Hungarian language. After uploading the video, the application creates a .srt subtitle in seconds, which contains what is said in the video, timed to milliseconds. A key feature of the artificial intelligence-based solution is its ability to identify sentence boundaries and proper names, based on which it handles uppercase and lowercase letters and punctuation as well. The solution is also able to distinguish between different speakers, which is indicated by a hyphen in the subtitle. When it comes to subtitling videos, you can save a lot of time with Alrite even calculating the reviewing of the generated subtitles. After creating the caption, you can upload the its file to Facebook on the interface described earlier.

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Source: Zubtitle, Digiday, AdEspresso, Agorapulse

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