How Subtitles Boost Engagement For Your Videos

We previously shared why subtitles are essential to boost your video engagements. A survey conducted by Stagetext in 2021 observed that 80% of individuals between 18-25 years watch videos with subtitles. Preply also observed that  61% of Americans watch videos with captions because the accent of the speaker(s) is difficult to understand.

If you’re still not convinced, here are proven ways in which subtitling can help increase interaction with your video.

8 Ways Subtitles Help to Increase Viewership of Your Video

Subtitles Will Help You to Attract Non-Native Audiences

There are many people on the Internet looking to learn common languages like the English language. When your videos are equipped with subtitles in these languages, they stand a chance of gaining more audience as watching videos and reading subtitles has become a great opportunity for many to learn a new language.

Enables You to Reach Audiences with Hearing Impairment

As a content creator, it is important to be aware of the impact your videos could have on diverse members of the community. Adding subtitles helps build a more inclusive environment since people with hearing impairments can follow through with subtitles and understand the contents of your video. Some countries even have accessibility regulations stating that videos must come with subtitles or captions to make content accessible to everyone.

Subtitling Helps to Improve a Viewer’s Understanding of Different Accents

Common languages like English are spoken all across the globe. Even though they speak the same language, different countries may speak is differently with different accents. Some audience groups, especially non-native speakers, may find it difficult to understand certain accents. In such cases, including subtitles will help these groups better understand your video, increasing views and engagement.

Makes it Easy for Viewers to Watch Your Videos in Noisy Environments

Sometimes we access videos in public spaces, away from the comfort of our homes. Noisy environments such as busy outdoors can hinder viewers from listening to what is being said in the video. If you turn on subtitles, it will be easier to concentrate despite the distractions.

Captions on Your Youtube Video are Indexed for Search

In a video by YouTube’s Content Creator Academy, it says:

“In terms of search, discovery, and engagement, captions are one of the most powerful pieces of data out there. The internet is text-based, so your video is going to stay hidden from search engines unless the text attached to it can be picked up. It can be hard to get across the essence of your video in just a title or description, even tags have a character limit. But a closed-caption file delivers a text-based transcript of your entire video and opens it up to search engines… Text on screen has proven to be so engaging that it increases the watch to completion rate. These two factors lead to a monumental gain in SEO ranking and engagement.“

This means that having captions will help YouTube understand what your video is about, and rank your video on its search function accordingly.

Subtitles Keep Your Viewers with Short Attention Spans Glued

With captions, your viewers become subconsciously glued to reading the texts with a curiosity to understand what happens next. Playing around with the font colour and type gives the subtitles an attractive look that will also help increase interaction.

Automated Captions vs Human-Generated Subtitles

YouTube has an automatic captioning function that uses speech recognition technology to automatically create captions for your videos. However, automatic captions might misrepresent the spoken content due to mispronunciations, accents, dialects, or background noise.

With wrong auto-captions, the search engine will not be able to crawl the video and pick all the keywords appropriately. That’s why it is important to upload a well-edited transcript alongside your video to help YouTube understand your content better.

Get started on your subtitles

Now you know how important transcripts and subtitles are to your video. Increase your audience base and let your viewers know you care about them by making your content easy to consume. Generating well-edited subtitles do not need to be time consuming.

Auris AI helps you transcribe and caption your videos automatically for FREE. If your speakers in your videos are clear, Auris AI can immediately generate accurate transcriptions and subtitles, quickly offering you a first draft to easily edit after. It also has a translate function that helps you translate your subtitles to different languages, which you can use to reach a global audience. Visit Auris AI to start your transcription journey today!