It should not be surprising to anyone that video has become a common sight in social media, both for personal or promotional usage. Video has pushed all other forms of content behind its back when it comes to attracting and engaging viewers. We’ve all witnessed the exaggerated quantity of videos uploaded worldwide every minute, every hour, whether on YouTube, Facebook, and even Instagram.

But, there’s a significant difference in doing video from doing video well and one incredibly easy way you can heighten your video’s influence? Add Subtitles!

What are Video Subtitles?

Subtitles are the appearing text, overlaid on a video expressing the spoken part of that video. Those are the translated versions of a video’s transcription, intended to provide the viewer with a real-time experience of what is happening on screen. Subtitles usually are seen as text on the bottom of the screen. Normally, subtitles are meant for use by audiences who do not speak the language used in the video, but who can still catch other sounds, like music, and can determine which person is talking.

However, subtitles for the Deaf or Hard-of-Hearing (SDH) also incorporate significant non-dialogue information, such as speaker classification or sound effects. The additional information in these subtitles can support in comprehension if a viewer cannot hear the video.

Understanding How Subtitles Work

It seems almost too intuitive to notice, but a lot of people, especially marketers, don’t even consider subtitles when creating their video content. Subtitles are an invaluable extension to any video content out there, whether it be video ads, films, TV shows, and now, vlogs.

Watching video with subtitles improves experience

Some people doesn’t like subtitles and insist that it’s disturbing, but they may not be seeing the big picture. Subtitles do a lot more than just present the speech or the conversation of a video. In fact, subtitles, captions, and other transcriptions are pretty advantageous to all types of video content. Here are six great benefits of subtitles!

1. Provide clarity of any technical language, jargons, full names, and brand names

Adding subtitles to your video can add clarity to content, including technical language, industry jargon, or brand names. It is useful when watching shows that go beyond day-to-day topics. Now, imagine a medical or crime drama series with several technical terminologies, or a fictional series with bizarre places and unusual names. It will definitely be challenging to develop along with the story and the characters if the audience doesn’t recognize or know half of the words being spoken. Subtitles can implement the required clarity for viewers and make them enjoy and learn whatever they’re watching.

For the listeners, abbreviations, lingo, or individual names may be more troublesome to decipher, particularly if the viewer isn’t familiar with your industry. Subtitles can support a viewer to identify information more efficiently by rendering an audio and visual stimulus.

2. Enhancing language skills

If you are fascinated in learning or enhancing your language skills, part of your training experience can be to watch movies or hear music in the language you are studying. Reading books can get a little boring, so you may appreciate that activity by watching or listening to something entertaining. But that can only accomplish if that foreign movie has subtitles or access to lyrics which pieces of research to your spoken language.

As subtitles help in literacy and comprehension, they can also benefit bilingual education. People quickly learn a new language by watching and being exposed to foreign flicks and displays with subtitles. Other than that, in one study by the National Institute of Health, they found that subtitles help ESL learners and others in many ways, which include learning comprehension, recognition, and retention.

3. Widen reach, availability for anyone and anywhere

Accessibility is a significant advantage of utilizing subtitles. Whether it be online videos, movies, or tv shows, anyone, including the deaf and the hard of hearing, can use them. Subtitles enable them to see and engage with these just as any hearing person would.

The Korean thriller movie Parasite earned recognition and made foreign movie history as it gained the Best Foreign Language Film during the 2020 Golden Globe Awards. In his speech, Director Bong Joon Ho has stated that once the barrier of subtitles are overcome, the world will be introduced to so many more amazing films. These words have impacted everyone’s ability to comprehend and enjoy foreign movies with ease with the help of Subtitles. In this case, it’s a win-win situation for both the audience and the movies.

Subtitles enable you to extend your reach and allows audiences to watch more foreign films and designates other than English flicks. At the same time, subtitles also widen the scope of filmmakers and production businesses with every foreign language subtitle they produce.

4. Manageable Viewing in Sound-Sensitive Environments

Because of subtitles, viewers can watch your videos in places where audio is not good to be heard. If you are inside a clamoring train or a congested street, subtitles will carry the speech when the sound is muted. It also allows viewers to enjoy videos on silent in quiet environments like an office, library, or private areas where silence is a requirement.

Autoplaying videos on silent is a typical practice in social media platforms nowadays. However, without sound or subtitles, viewers will not be capable of understanding your content. When you are somewhere quiet, and a “Silent Please!” sign is on the wall, but you want to watch a video, you can still sneak and understand what the video is all about with the help of subtitles.

5. Better User Engagement And Experience

Adding subtitles to your videos will lead to benefits of heightening engagement metrics beyond the board. Here are significant statistic result that proves the value of subtitles to your videos:

Suppose your video involves words that resonate with the viewer, and those words are large enough to be viewed and recognized instantly. In that case, your video stands a much better possibility of having an impression.

6. Boost Search Engine Ranking

According to experts, having the right subtitles embedded in your video boosts your content position higher on search engines. Even though your content quality should be your main concern, adding video subtitles can increase the search rankings.

YouTube, by fact, is considered as the second largest search engine in the world after Google. That’s why it’s important to make your videos easy to find when searching for it. There are many ways indeed of doing that, but having subtitles on your YouTube video can have an impression on your search engine optimization and make it easier for your videos to be discoverable. Therefore, if people spend more time viewing your videos, it will positively affect your rankings. Social shares represent a role, too. And interesting content to more people benefits boosting visits and decrease bounce rates.

Google has spiders known as Googlebots, that regularly index pages, but these crawlers can’t see a video or listen to the audio. The only data it can crawl is the text included with it, such as video title, description, keywords, calls-to-action, etc. Now, having subtitles, your video’s keyword extent increases as your content gets indexed even by keywords that are not included in your titles, or descriptions but are in your subtitles. Adding subtitles does the crawling possible as Google gives the recognition of your video, making them more searchable and overtaking your competition.

It’s Time To Add Subtitles to Your Videos

As you’ve learned the importance of subtitles to your videos, then it’s time to start. The basis behind adding subtitles to your videos is simple. With the technology that we have today, you can choose whether to add it manually, which will consume much of your time, or you can hire a transcription company that will cost you a lot. There is also a better and quick way, and that is by using an auto video subtitles generator that can lessen costs, effort, and, most of all, save your time.

Once you’ve generated your subtitles, you can either save them in a different file so your video can be viewed with or without them or encode them directly into the video, so they’re always shown. It’s better to give viewers a choice to view them or not.

If you want to know how to add subtitles to your videos easily and automatically, check out this blog post on How To Automatically Generate Video Subtitles Using SubtitleBee.