Boost your Video Success with Subtitles

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Looking for ways to make your videos more visible? For ways to create better interaction with your viewers? Don’t forget subtitles! You will gain more from subtitles than you might think. For example, did you know that subtitles can help you achieve video SEO?  And upgrade your overall video performance?

Nowadays, we face a constantly growing audience craving videos like never before. Knowing this, it is no wonder that videos are the number one prioritised content online, with a booming dominance and popularity on social media platforms like YouTube and Instagram. In line with this we see an increasing interest in and development of video-editing software that can help content creators amplify their work.

Subtitling your videos is one of the most time-consuming video editing tasks, but with the help from AI subtitling software, it has become a walk in the park. As a result of the revolutionary development in advanced computer technology, including artificial intelligence, it has become possible to auto-generate subtitles. But what are the actual advantages of subtitles, and how do we make sure to use them to their full potential?

How to Deal with Muted Videos

Did you know that most videos are watched on mute? It might sound strange, but it is an outcome of today’s digital world, where the majority of videos are watched in public spaces. Even at home people tend to mute videos or reduce the audio volume. As a result of this, everything said in a video is often not heard.

So there goes all the effort you put into creating a meaningful video, you might think. Don’t worry! A simple way to get around this is by adding subtitles to your videos. This way you unite the visual and audible parts of your video, and you ensure that those on mute “hear” you as well.

Consider Everyone

Around 466 million people worldwide are deaf or hard of hearing – a number expected to rise to 700 million by 2050. In excess of this 2.5 billion people are thought to have some degree of hearing impairment. These are not small numbers and by adding subtitles you include everyone.

Subtitles Create video SEO

SEO might sound cryptic but is worth understanding since it has become a very important factor in today’s competitive landscape of online content. SEO is short for search engine optimization and is a term describing the ranking process of online content, done by all kinds of search engine machines, with the most well known example being Google. Search engine robots are used to regularly “crawl” websites to detect ranking factors, such as keywords and engagement metrics, to rank and match pages to relevant search inquiries.

Unfortunately, when it comes to videos, search engine crawlers cannot detect the visual and audible content, and therefore, videos are not valued in SEO. However, if you add a subtitle file containing relevant keywords to your video, you will allow the crawlers to “read” it and this way your subtitles can create video SEO for you.

Be aware, this doesn’t mean that all types of subtitles will provide you with video SEO. The subtitles that add SEO to your video are called closed caption subtitles. They are created and uploaded as a separate subtitle file (SRT, VTT) to your video, and can be turned on and off.

The type of subtitles that will not enrich you with SEO are open caption subtitles and they are burned onto your video. Meaning, they have become one entity and cannot be turned off. Crawlers are not able to detect this type and therefore they do not have any SEO value.

Lost in translation

Subtitles are often needed when you present your content  on the worldwide internet. Your video might be relevant to many more than just the ones geographically close to you, so why should you let language barriers stop you from sharing your content?

Closed caption subtitles gives you the opportunity to add a range of subtitles translated into different languages. Technically, it is possible to translate subtitles into hundreds of different languages, but select the languages that will benefit both you and your viewers the most.

Let AI Software do the Hard Work

It is no secret that manually typing subtitles is a time-consuming task. Luckily, there is no need to do so anymore. With the help of AI subtitling software, you can add subtitles to your video in a matter of minutes. Some software can transcribe 2 hours of video in just 20 minutes.

A worry might be whether the AI will convert the speech into correct words. This is a natural concern to have as AI software is nowhere near reaching the intelligence of human beings. Although, when it comes to subtitling, AI is usually quite precise, with an accuracy up to 98%. AI uses speech recognition and neural network algorithms to transcribe the speech into subtitles – making AI subtitling software a great and appreciated tool.

In translating, AI software is less accurate, as this is a more complex task to perform than subtitling. This comes down to the greatly diverse characteristics of languages. The AI though is more accurate than non-AI translation software. Where regular software translates word by word, AI uses advanced language models with composition, structure, syntax, and grammar to compose and translate into the most plausible sentence. Therefore, AI translation software is a helpful assistant for professional translators, as well as a sufficient tool for most social media content creators.

Conclusion? Subtitle your videos, be sure they are closed caption subtitles, include important keywords in your script, translate them to expand your reach, and get AI software to help you in order to save loads of time.