The Sound of Silence: Using Captions to Capture Video Views

With the growing amount of video on the web today, it is important now more than ever to get your content to stand out in a sea of video. A proven way to do this by adding captions to your social video content.

With social captions you can:

• Provide sound off video viewing for social 
• Optimize your SEO strategy
• Ensure your content is accessible for everyone

Provide sound off video viewing on social

Whether during your commute, at your desk, or on the couch, sometimes you just can’t watch videos with sound on. In fact, more than 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound! It is important to keep that in mind and optimize your social video content for sound off viewing. An easy way to do this is by adding captions to the videos you publish to social media.

Placing captions in your social videos allows your viewers to fully understand the dialog of each video you publish. Reading the captions as the video plays lets viewers get a full understanding of what is being said throughout the video.

Optimize your SEO strategy

Let’s start from the beginning, what is SEO? Search Engine Optimization, aka SEO, is the process of maximizing the number of web visitors to your website by ensuring it appears higher on the list of results returned by a search engine.

One of the best ways to optimize SEO is by adding closed captions to your videos, allowing your videos to be referenced as it plays. Since search engine bots are constantly crawling the internet, when you have closed caption files in your videos those videos will then be indexed and weighted in your search results. In fact, our partner 3PlayMedia released a case study that highlights how Discovery Digital Networks saw an overall increase of 7.32% in video views for their captioned YouTube videos!

Ensuring Video Accessibility

Social media platforms as a whole still have a long way to go when it comes to accessibility. But Facebook and YouTube are starting to pave the way. By supporting closed caption files, they are empowering those with hearing impairments to fully digest and understand social videos.

The short story is that captions for your social videos can give you a leg up and expand your audience. Good news! Brightcove has you covered. Read our topic on how to add captions to your social videos.