In today’s competitive digital world, it is essential that you employ an effective approach to captivate and engage your target audience. Video content has become incredibly popular on social media platforms due to its accessibility and entertaining nature, meaning videos are part of most modern marketing strategies nowadays, and in this article, we will explore a very clear video feature: subtitles!
In fact, there is more to subtitles than you might think. Subtitles play an important role in mediating the communication of online video content: they create improved comprehension of video content – leading to better engagement metrics; they can participate in securing higher search engine rankings – leading to more views; and not least, they can give rise to the opportunity of reaching a global audience – leading to overall increased chances of success.
Thanks to the development of artificial computer intelligence we are not left to manually subtitle our videos anymore. We have innovative software within our reach that can generate automatic subtitles for videos.
Discover why subtitles are becoming increasingly popular as we examine their many advantages!
Videos Played Silently
In a world where videos are watched in increasingly more public spaces and with the audio volume significantly decreased or completely muted, subtitles provide an essential way to ensure viewers understand your message. They unite audible content with visual elements so that even when sound is not heard, your details will be processed correctly by those watching!
However, that decreased audio volume might not always be voluntary. Hearing difficulties are a significant global challenge, with currently 466 million people in the world experiencing some degree of reduced hearing. This number is expected to rise dramatically over the next three decades – up to 700 million by 2050.
In excess of these numbers, 2.5 billion individuals are thought to have various degrees of hearing loss worldwide, and knowing this – it’s not odd that subtitles originally when movies with sound became possible, were used to assist those hard of hearing. And, this will continuously be a relevant purpose for subtitling videos.
Studies have shown that the comprehension of, attention to, and memory of videos are significantly improved when subtitles are present. In fact, they increase engagement rates by up to 80%.
The Language Barrier
Going global is the way of the future. As we know, with only a few clicks through the internet, we can make content available to audiences around the world and open up vast new opportunities for success. The only thing standing in our way? Language barriers! And unless we are categorised as a linguistic genius, this could be a tricky obstacle to conquer.
One option is hiring a professional translator. In some cases that’s definitely the most recommendable thing to do. But if you want to translate your video subtitles for video content shared on for instance social media platforms you don’t have to stretch your budget or use excessive time om expert help. You can easily and quite fast translate your videos automatically with an AI subtitle generator and translator.
Let’s look into the specifics of AI subtitling and translation.
AI to help Automate the Process of Subtitling and Translation?
We don’t need to exaggerate when referring to the process of automated subtitling and translation as a revolution. Because for people working with video editing on a daily basis, the forthcoming advanced subtitling and translation software truly is a time-saver and a chance to streamline the otherwise tedious and sometimes linguistically challenging task of subtitling.
AI-powered software can now quickly transcribe video speech into text and create subtitles for videos in mere minutes – with remarkable accuracy especially when audio is clear. In fact, the accuracy of transcribing speech into text with AI is up to 98%. Additionally, the same software allows users to effortlessly translate the subtitles into multiple languages; ensuring content creators have an efficient way of reaching a global audience.
Subtitle Design
Although the task of subtitling has become automated, it doesn’t mean that there’s no need for editing subtitles anymore. As many experienced video editors will know most subtitles are actually shortened in regards to the whole transcript of video speech. This comes down to the fact that people tend to speak faster than they read, and we want subtitles to be easy to read – therefore we leave out some excessive words that are not relevant in order to understand the whole context.
Editing of subtitles is about more than words, it’s also about the subtitle style and position on the screen. Choose font, size, color, background, position, and more to make your subtitles count in defining your brand and message, and to complement the design of your video.
The editing part of subtitling is a clear reason why we shouldn’t just rely on direct auto-generated captions on social media platforms. It doesn’t allow us to modify our subtitles to fit our video. The subtitles might end up covering some important graphics that we could have avoided by changing position or background – or the subtitle style might look odd in regard to our video. If you’ve tried it, you know the trouble.
Linguistic Characteristics
When it comes to translation, no software is as accurate as a professional human translator can be. This is due to all the linguistic characteristics that are not easy for machines to understand. Pre-AI translation software is based on word-by-word translations – often resulting in sentences with a nonsense context.
Although it isn’t perfect, AI software has taken translation to another level, by utilising advanced language models that consider grammar, sentence structure, and other language-specific features that matter. Therefore AI-powered translation software can in fact translate into accurate and meaningful sentences and is indeed very useful when needing to translate subtitles for videos. With AI software you can translate your video subtitles into a selection of languages to fit your target audiences’ needs.
Subtitles to Help obtain a better SEO Strategy
Adding subtitle files to videos has a secret superpower: it can positively boost your search engine optimization! SEO, short for search engine optimization, involves the process of search engine robots crawling the internet detecting specific ranking factors on each website page in order to rank it. Keywords are the number one ranking factor that counts in SEO, as they can enable robots to position web pages in compatible search inquiries. Meaning matching your content with viewers’ specific requests and increasing visibility!
However, when it comes to videos, robots can’t detect audible and visual content, and therefore only the engagement metrics of videos are considered in SEO, not the actual content. Obviously, a bit of a bummer, when considering all the work put into video-making! But, there is a way to get around this. Make sure to include those all-important keywords in the title, tags, and subtitles. This will give the search engine robots something to chew on and allow them to rank your video fairly in the search engine system. Ensure that your keywords actually describe what your video is about, and the other way around – so that your content will answer your viewers’ queries. This way you can keep your viewers engaged and avoid high bouncing rates!
Closed caption subtitles
Although subtitles are the secret spice to the video recipe, it’s not just any kind of subtitles that can contribute to improved SEO. It specifically has to be a subtitle file and the kind referred to as closed caption subtitles. This is the kind of subtitles uploaded as an SRT or VTT file together with the video on the video distribution platform, and it can be turned on and off. It further allows the option of adding a selection of subtitles in different languages for the audience to choose between.
Create Closed Caption Subtitles
You can create closed caption subtitles by uploading your video to the subtitle generator, adding automatic subtitles, editing and translating them if needed, and in the end downloading the subtitles separately as SRT or VTT files to upload with your video on the platform of your choice.
If you prefer to add hardcoded subtitles to your video – the kind of subtitles that are always there, and can’t be turned off – they are created the same way, except the saving process is different, as you export the whole video with the subtitles burned onto it. Note that this will not have an effect on SEO.
Subtitles, SEO, Success!
So, the aim is to use all these juicy benefits of subtitles to their fullest. Use closed caption subtitles if you can, make sure your keywords correspond well with your video content and find the balance between you and your audience: open up, be inclusive, clarify your message with confidence, and invite your audience to engage with your video content. Whether you are making informative, commercial, entertaining, or educational videos – or a mix – subtitles create improved ways of reaching a bigger audience.
