Looking for ways to make your video more visible to your target audience? Hold on here, because you have found one of your answers. Subtitles will take your video to the next level, by giving rise to a bunch of benefits.
As the demand and audience for videos are constantly increasing – the competition to make your video stand out has grown, especially on social media platforms such as YouTube, Instagram and TikTok.
Luckily, in line with this, video quality and video-editing tools are evolving. Thanks to the revolutionary development within advanced computer technology, including artificial intelligence (AI), there are now multiple video-editing software, that can auto-generate subtitles for you.
Benefits of adding subtitles to your video
Subtitles, first of all, represent the spoken words written in text and therefore unite the visual and audible part of a video. It gives a better comprehension of the video and improves engagement metrics such as likes and comments.
Did you know that most videos are watched on mute? To keep discrete or to avoid disturbing people around. Meaning all being said will not be heard or recognized at all.
Market analysis shows that adding subtitles can improve engagement rates by up to 80%. In fact, hundreds of studies have led to the conclusion that subtitling a video will improve comprehension, attention to, and memory of the video.
Make Your Videos Inclusive
Originally subtitles were used to support the meaning of content in silent movies in the 1900s. When movies with audio became possible subtitles use shifted towards assisting the audio and towards making the movies inclusive for those hard of hearing.
WHO states that 466 million people are suffering from hearing difficulties globally. This is one in twenty people, and it is expected to rise to 700 million people worldwide by 2050. In extending of this around 2.5 billion people are having some level of hearing loss. Subtitles created particularly to support the deaf or hard of hearing are referred to as SDH subtitles. In addition to the spoken words, they also include other audible sounds like the wind blowing or relaxing music.
Not only are subtitles needed to make sure your audience understands your script and engages with your video – subtitles are also needed when your audience simply doesn’t understand the spoken language. Fortunately, several AI subtitle softwares are also able to translate your subtitles for you – giving you the opportunity to expand your audience internationally.
Appear Different to Your Audience
Play around with your subtitle design. Do you think the subtitle style is chosen randomly? – usually not! Fonts have a message and a meaning – just like the style of your clothes.
Adding subtitles gives a new opportunity to personalise your video content by styling your subtitles. Picking a font style in correspondence to your brand and the message of your video can strengthen your overall video performance. It furthermore allows you to outline specific keywords, for instance by writing them in capital letters or highlighting them.
Whether you are looking for a clean and simple look or for a more artistic look, keep in mind that when it comes to subtitles – clarity is key.
Increase Video SEO
SEO is short for search engine optimization and is about how different search engines, like Google and others, rank your content depending on factors such as relevant keywords, engagement metrics etc. The search engines then use robots to regularly “crawl” websites to detect their content. Unfortunately, these search engine robots are not able to understand the visual and audible part of a video, and as a result do not consider video content – unless the videos have closed caption subtitles, captions and/or a transcript. Relevant keywords in your subtitles increase search engine rankings and therefore make your video count in SEO.
How to get automatic subtitles
Adding your subtitles manually can take up to days, depending on your video length. Hiring a professional to do it for you is rather expensive. That is why I am tempted to say that using AI software to automatically generate the subtitles for you is a must-have video-editing tool.
Using an AI subtitling software to add automatically generated subtitles to your video will save you time and give you the opportunity to streamline your work.
A worry when using an AI subtitle auto generator can be whether the software will transcribe the spoken words correctly. What if it gets all the words wrong and converts the speech into something rather unintelligible? That is a reasonable concern to have, as we know that AI software is nowhere near reaching the stage of human intelligence. Though, when it comes to transcribing words into text, most AI softwares are quite precise. They use speech recognition and neural network algorithms to detect words and transcribe them into text, with accuracy for this function up to 98%. This doesn’t mean we don’t have to inspect the subtitles after they have been auto-generated – it just means that it is a manageable task for the AI software to perform for us.
There is a rising selection of new online software that can create automatically generated subtitles for videos, but make sure to choose a good one. Some software providers offer a free version of their software. We highly recommend you take advantage of this so that you can find out if it suits your needs and avoids wasting money on something that is not for you.
Tips to make great subtitles
1# Consider that your subtitles must be easy to read: short sentences and big font size, preferably point size 22.
2# Avoid making your subtitles too long. Keep them within 42 characters, equal to 6-7 words per line. And try to break the subtitle line where there would naturally be a sentence break.
3# Position your subtitles at the bottom of the screen to avoid them clashing with other texts/captions or pictures on the screen.
4# Convert your subtitles into a blog. This way you can increase your online content – only by recycling your material. As a bonus, you also increase your SEO. If you are posting on for instance YouTube, you can add your transcript in the video description. The good news is that you don’t have to type everything into a document to get a transcript of your video. Just download your subtitles as a text file (SRT, VTT or TXT file), and voila! You have converted your subtitles into a transcript! Furthermore, this can be very beneficial for learning purposes.
5# Make sure you include some main search keywords in your video speech before you generate your subtitles. The search engine crawlers are unable to hear what is being said in the video, but they can detect text files. So, if you add a subtitle file with your main keyphrases, it will help crawlers understand your video better. This will also improve your keyword profile and help you appear in search queries that matter to your business. Therefore we underline the essential importance of including the right keywords in your speech AND subtitles.
6# Use closed caption subtitles rather than open caption subtitles.
Open caption subtitles are hardcoded into your video, meaning they have become part of the visual aspect of your video. A single entity, and as an unfavourable result, search engine crawlers are unable to read your subtitles. Therefore instead – add closed caption subtitles by uploading VTT, SRT or TXT subtitles to your video distribution platform. This way search engine crawlers can detect, read, and understand your video speech.
7# Upload your videos on the right platform, that allows you to upload subtitle files like SRT, VTT or TXT to your video. Ideally, a fast video-delivering platform, so that your users can watch your videos comfortably without too much loading time.
