Video is one of the biggest means of building brand awareness, increasing website traffic, generating leads and growing sales. Despite the huge potential of video, coupled with the rise of online video consumption, many companies are finding it hard to build an audience. With about 500 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute it’s crucial that you take the necessary steps to ensure that your video can be easily found and reach your target audience.
According to a recent white paper undertaken by Cisco, “Cisco Visual Networking Index: Forecast and Methodology, 2014–2019”, worldwide consumer internet video traffic will be 80 percent of all consumer Internet traffic in 2019, up from 64 percent in 2014. Nevertheless, video remains, for the most part, an unused opportunity to increase awareness and reach a global audience. An alarming finding from Cisco’s whitepaper is that in 2019 it will take an individual over 5 million years to watch the amount of video that will cross global IP networks each month. Given this fact, how do you get your video to stand out from the crowd, have it listed on search engines for people to find and grow your audience on a global scale? The answer lies in captions, transcriptions and subtitles, and here’s why:
1. Increased visibility on Search Engines
Search engines cannot read videos but they can read text. Closed captions and subtitles are one of the least employed SEO tactics on YouTube and other video hosting sites. By creating transcripts and captions for your videos, you will turn all the text into searchable keywords for the search engines to discover and index. Search engines rank captions in the same way as they rank keywords. What was once just another video sitting on your website waiting to be discovered, turns into a powerful content tool that will drive extra website traffic.
2. Reach the 400 million people who are deaf and hard of hearing
Increase your audience by allowing the 400 million people worldwide who are deaf and hard of hearing to enjoy your video through the addition of closed captions. Today almost all information is available through video, and it is important that content creators make their videos accessible to those who are deaf and hard of hearing. Authorities are now recognising the needs of the deaf and hard of hearing people through the introduction of laws concerning audio-visual services. It is only a matter of time before stringent laws will be introduced in the online world. There have been some recent campaigns on YouTube, notably the efforts of YouTuber Rikki Poynter (@rikkipoynter), who is hard of hearing, through the campaign “Deaf Accessibility On YouTube!” where she calls for producers to make their work more accessible.
3. Allow your audience to better understand your message
Some videos, especially educational ones, are hard to grasp in one go. By adding text to your video, you reinforce your message allowing the viewer to better understand the key messages and information you are sharing. Closed captions and subtitles also allow viewers whose native language is not English to enjoy and fully consume your video.
4. Support literacy and children’s development
Watching videos with subtitles and captions can help children improve their literacy, which can help boost foundational reading skills, such as phonics, word recognition, and fluency.
5. Open up your video to global audiences
Like transcripts and closed captions in the original language, foreign language transcripts and subtitles are searchable. Given that 80% of YouTube views are from outside of the U.S and that it is possible to navigate YouTube in a total of 76 different languages, doesn’t it make sense to create foreign versions of your original video? With so much content available on the web, people no longer want to watch foreign videos; they expect a native experience with the video in their own language.
6. Increase the chances of your video going viral
Getting your video to go viral is not an easy task! You may have a video that is of high sharing quality but is it easy to find across the worldwide web? Aside from these simple tips from Entrepreneur, we highly recommend that you add subtitles and closed captions for all the reasons listed in points 1-5 above. A great example is this video by Fly Emirates . It not only perfectly shows the wining ingredients for a viral video but also brilliantly uses subtitles and closed captions, thus opening it up to a worldwide audience.
If writing out your video script is not your idea of fun, get in touch with Haymillian for all your transcription, subtitling and captioning needs.
