Are Subtitles for Videos the Way Forward? Here’s Why You Should Consider Them

You Make Your Videos Inclusive

Around 37.5 million American adults have some trouble hearing, and 28.8 million are at the stage of hearing loss wherein they’ll benefit from using hearing aids.

To them, watching videos without subtitles become a chore. With modern technology, this shouldn’t even be a problem for them. However, not all video creators think to provide subtitles.

It’s about time video producers prioritize inclusivity to all. This will also help in that you can still relay your message even if they can’t hear the audio quite well.

Subtitles are also a great way to reach other people who may not be speaking your language. It’s expensive to remake the same video in different languages. It’s also more effort to hire a different speaker for every language you want to cover and then upload all variations on the same platform.

With subtitles for videos, everyone can watch the same video. All they have to do is choose from the available subtitle options. They enjoy and learn from your video, and you send your message across efficiently.

It Allows People to Watch Your Video Without Audio

Even people with great hearing can’t always turn on the audio of a video, though. For instance, a person without earphones on the train will keep the video on mute or keep the audio low so as not to disturb the other passengers.

Other people simply don’t like turning on the audio. They might be listening to their favorite song or may want to digest a video in silence.

No matter, the fact remains that users are watching around 85% of videos on Facebook without sound. 

If you’re one of these people, you’ll skip the videos that can’t provide what you want, right? As a publisher, you don’t want these people skipping your videos because they might be your target users.

Adding subtitles makes your video accessible in any scenario. Your viewers will appreciate it and you get to reach them still.

Subtitled Videos Improve Comprehension

Many things can muddle even the highest quality of audio in a video to a listener. It can be because of bad speakers or earphones, a heavy accent, external sources of noise, and such. The listener might also be not fluent in the language spoken in the video.

If you want to increase the reach of your video, subtitles ensure that anyone can understand its message. If the speaker(s) in the video has a heavy accent, for instance, people in other regions might not be able to follow the speech even if they speak the same language. Think of the other regions and other countries.

Even if a non-native speaker watches your video, reading instead of straining their ears can help them better understand what the video is saying. They can even pause the video to read the subtitles, which is impossible to do with pure audio.

Native speakers may also prefer reading the subtitles even if they can perfectly understand the video without. To them, subtitles help them understand it better.

Furthermore, subtitles allow a person to grasp new words better. If they encounter a word they haven’t heard/seen before, knowing its spelling lets them look it up at a dictionary later. 

Your Viewers Become More Engaged

A video with full audio isn’t enough to keep viewers engaged nowadays. Our attention span has gone down from 12 seconds in 2000 to eight seconds today. If you’re wondering how bad that is; remember that a goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds.

You can help them focus on your video, though, by adding subtitles. Instead of feeding the information to them, you can make their brains work by having them read.

Furthermore, if the video only has audio, they may get tempted to do other stuff while listening instead. They can, for example, continue to scroll down their feed while the video plays on the background.

Having subtitles lessen the chances of that occurring. They’ll be more willing to put their attention on the video because reading engages them. 

You can also keep them watching that way. When they’re more focused, they’re more likely to watch until the end of the video. 

They can then get to the part where you have your CTA, closing remark, and other marketing elements. 

Subtitles for Videos Help SEO

You may already have an idea of how SEO works. Search engines crawl a webpage to find keywords, optimizations, and other technical details to get an idea of what it’s about and to judge its quality.

They do the same to videos; but now they don’t only look at the title, file name, and such. They can now also crawl the content and determine its relevance to search terms. However, they can only do this if the video has captions and subtitles.

It won’t bother “listening” to the audio; rather it’s “reading” the content. 

If you want your video to be more searchable, it’s a good idea to put in subtitles. That way, more people can find it, thus more views, leading you closer to your goal.

Add Subtitles for Videos Now

The keys to adding effective subtitles for videos are accuracy and timing. It should mirror what the audio is saying exactly, and it should show up at the same time they’re spoken. 

With a reliable video production service, however, you don’t need to worry about such things. Contact us today and let’s discuss how we can help you achieve your goals.