Are you making videos to advertise your business? Are you making personal videos? Are you getting the results you want? Do they convey your message as you want them to?
A single solution for all these questions is:
Putting Captions on your videos.
Whether you’re making slideshow videos or any other kind of videos, you simply cannot afford not to caption them.
Here’s why.
#1 Autoplay Feature in Facebook, Instagram
If you’re making a video for your business or organization, you’re obviously going to share it on your Facebook and Instagram profile.
We still remember the days when Facebook and Instagram first introduced the video autoplay feature. Businesses rejoiced having created brilliant ads and musics on par with the Bond movie soundtracks. However, the clicks were minimal, those oh-so brilliant videos weren’t generating any leads.
The main reason?
Lack of Captions.
Even if you’re only creating slideshow videos with a voice-over, your pictures aren’t going to be enough to grasp your audience’s full attention.
Since captions can’t be muted, it’s the best bet you have of grabbing your viewers’ full attention.
#2 Increase in Mobile Viewing
Recent reports show that video viewing has moved from desktops to mobile phones. This has resulted in video viewing not being as conductive to audio as before, since viewers could be in noise sensitive areas.
Even if the viewers are watching the video on desktops, they would need their speakers muted in workplaces and/or libraries. Captions provide an alternative to understand the video. And captions make videos watchable in any environment.
#3 Improves Comprehension
According to the recent study conducted by BBC, 80% of people who watch videos prefer watching videos with captions as it helps them to understand the content better.
Recent study conducted by YouTube showed that 80% of views come from outside the US and 67.5% of total views come from non-English speaking countries. So, it goes without saying that adding captions to the videos improves the understanding of your viewers.
#4 Increased SEO and Video Views
A study conducted by This American Life (TAL) reported that adding transcripts boosts SEO. Search engines do not recognize pictures and video clips, and relies on title, metadata etc. Adding captions or transcripts means that your videos can now be properly indexed, thus making your video more easily discoverable. Through the experiment, TAL found out that number of unique visitors who discovered TAL through organic search increased by 6.68%.
Another study conducted by Discovery Digital Networks showed that YouTube videos with captions were 13.48% more likely to be viewed in the first two weeks and 7.32% more likely to viewed in the long haul. Also, specific keywords can be placed into captions to further improve search rank.
#5 For People who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing
Approximately 38 million people in the US suffer some sort of hearing loss, which amount to 13% of the total population. That’s quite a significant number to consider not captioning your videos. Stating it briefly, captioning videos help you to expand your viewer base and helps them to understand your videos better.
Conclusion
There’s no point dwelling over the mistakes of the past. It’s time to start fresh, and including captions this time.
Luckily for you, we offer the perfect solution. Picovico – an online slideshow video maker is an easy to use web tool that lets you convert your pictures into videos effortlessly. Plus, you can also add captions to each of those pictures and give a better light to your story.
So, what are you waiting for?
1 Comment
Frank
These are truly fantastic.
You have touched some fastidious points here. Any way keep up writing.