Have you ever wondered if there was one extra action you could take to increase your foreign audience? Or wanted to acquaint a foreign target market to that wonderful product or service that you just know they need? If the answer is yes, then the time has come to consider foreign language subtitling.
It is a documented fact that professionals prefer to use YouTube for branding and marketing purposes. There is no denying that YouTube makes it tremendously easy to follow up with statistics. A wealth of metrics is available for monitoring on YouTube.
If you are one of these professionals who is aware of the YouTube advantage and use it as part of your content marketing strategy, then you already know about or are in the process of getting acquainted with the essentials of video optimization.
Headlines and descriptions, annotations in the form of links and buttons, tags and keywords in the channel and video name are all very important factors and should be carefully weighed and chosen.
Do a search on video optimization in YouTube. Another important factor to consider is that 70% of YouTube watchers are not based in the US and UK. Even when considering the US, we should take into account that 21% of the population speaks a language other than English as their first language.
YouTube has over 1 billion users and people spend millions of hours on YouTube channels every day, generating billions of views. It is very interesting to note that on average, 60% of views are outside the creator’s home country.
If you want to be on the top segment of these statistics and get a high rate of foreign viewers, either to promote your product and services or simply to increase awareness abroad, then adding transcriptions and foreign language subtitles to your video is a necessity, not a choice.
Like transcripts and closed captions in the original language, foreign language transcripts and subtitles are searchable. They will also offer a significant enhancement when launching a new language version of your website. Whether separate or combined, these two steps will ensure your videos appear whenever anyone does a foreign language search, leading to higher engagement and longer view time. This, in its turn, will boost video SEO.
Although search engines do not rank automatically translated foreign captions (e.g. YouTube) due to high error rates, they do rank the ones created by humans and this service is easily ordered with a small investment.
Creating subtitles with a professional subtitling company is cost effective and excellent service is guaranteed.
Because of the metric tools and great variety of statistics available, our numbers are mainly culled from YouTube. However, the same principle also applies to other video sharing sites. Be sure to utilize the capabilities of your transcription, caption and foreign language subtitles to the max by uploading them to other video sites like Brightcove, Vimeo and Dailymotion.
