3 Reasons Your Videos Need Captions

Discussing Machine Transcribed Audio in the Professional World of Accessibility

While many companies and even individual content creators have started to add closed-captioning to their online video content, the trend has not yet fully caught on across the web.

But this isn't just a trend that may or may catch on.

While adding closed captioning to any of your visual internet content may seem like a small detail, it's a crucial aspect to increasing the reach of your content and retaining your current clientele.

In this post, we'll outline 3 reasons why you should add captions to your videos!

Adding captions will increase your views

Captions allow viewers to watch your videos in any environment. Some audiences may only consume video content at home, where they can blare the sound as loud as they like (as as loud as their neighbours will allow before complaining).

However, other viewers may want to watch your videos on the go. Whether on public transit or in a communal private space, sometimes you just want to finish the final ten minutes of that last video you were watching without disrupting anyone around you.

Adding closed captions allows anyone to watch your content at any time and eliminates the barrier of needing to be in a specific space to watch your video.

By adding closed captioning on your videos, you can expect an increase in views and even a spike in your average watch time.

Adding captions will grow your audience

Adding captions can expand your current audience as well as expanding into new ones. Captions increase the accessibility of your videos in countless ways as well as providing equal opportunity to differently abled internet users.

For example, someone may be directly within the target demographic for a video you have created, but if they are hearing impaired it will impact their ability to watch your videos.

This could present a challenge for viewers and prevent your content from being easy to consume, or it could also limit people from watching it altogether.

Adding captions can allow any viewer, no matter their capability to hear, to enjoy what they may otherwise struggle watching. Not providing the hearing impaired with captions is not an enjoyable experience for anyone, and does not allow for you to expand into this audience.

Additionally, having captions at the ready allows you to translate your content into any language possible without having to reshoot your video or change the audio. This allows you the ability to simply translate your captions and BOOM! Suddenly your online reach is worldwide.

Adding video captions to your content will allow you to cater to far more viewers than you could have ever imagined, and it will keep your current client base happy, which is a positive outcome for all.

This is especially important if you are a course creator - imagine reaching and teaching even more people simply because you have closed captions and a transcript which you can then translate!

Captions provide accessibility to all audiences, and adding them can do wonders for your marketing as well as your company's conscience. Being inclusive benefits everyone!

Adding captions will make it easier to index your content for SEO

Let's face it, the biggest flaw in visual content is that it's just not as searchable as text.

This is especially detrimental if you're hoping to index your content for search engine optimization.

Any potential viewer scouring the web for new content will only stumble upon your videos based on the text you include in the title and description, and we all know how limiting that is.

By adding captions to your video, your visual content immediately becomes SEO searchable, and this will bring far more people to view your content. On top of that, you can provide an entire transcript of the video if you're so inclined!

How to Get Started

Wondering how to get your video captions up and running now that you're convinced?

Adding text based on audio can seem like a daunting task, especially if you have a lot of ground to cover.

You might picture yourself labouring for hours, hunched over your laptop and rewinding a specific video clip one hundred times, trying to type out the audio of it.

But don't panic! There is a much easier way.

Any audio content can easily be turned into a transcription with machine transcribed audio. This is a fast, simple, and painless way to create video captions with just the click of a button.

So what are you waiting for?

Let's get started!