You’ve invested a lot of time, creativity, and energy into producing your videos and now want them to be watched, liked, and shared? Then it’s essential that you add subtitles to your videos. Find out how subtitles help to ensure that your videos truly reach your target audience, who might be all too easily app-sorbed elsewhere.
Video – a firm favourite
The importance of audiovisual content has increased greatly in recent years. Whether they be feature films or series on streaming platforms, advertising and image films, videos on YouTube and Vimeo, e-learning videos, or videos for social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Instagram – audiovisual content has long been shaping our everyday lives. At the same time, videos are being watched more and more often on smartphones. In 2022, video accounted for almost 70% of all mobile data traffic, and this figure is expected to rise to 80% by 2028 (source: Ericsson Mobility Report 2022). Whether we are on the train, in the waiting room at the doctor’s, or queuing at the checkout – we use our smartphones for fun, to obtain information, or just to pass the time. Of course, video producers are delighted about this, because after all, they produce their videos precisely with this intention – that videos should be watched, liked, and shared. Subtitles help to achieve this goal.
Subtitles tap into the full potential of videos
Subtitles are much more than a line or two of text at the bottom of the screen – subtitles bring your stories to life in the language of your target audience. They make your videos accessible and understandable even without sound. Furthermore, they increase the reach, discoverability, and comprehensibility of videos and make it possible to use video content efficiently for other purposes as well.
Subtitles facilitate inclusion
Subtitles make videos and films accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people from the very outset. In this way, they contribute to improved inclusivity. According to estimates by the Swiss Federation of the Deaf, one in ten people in Switzerland is affected by hearing loss. So there is a whole swathe of the population – 10% – who miss out on content if videos do not have subtitles, in addition to all those users who watch videos without sound. Whether it be on a smartphone, on a laptop on the train, when headphones are not to hand or in the case of silent autoplay mode in social media feeds – there are numerous occasions when users want or need to watch videos with the sound turned off. Without subtitles, your videos remain silent and inaccessible to those users. Videos without subtitles don’t get watched, but rather sink without a trace into the digital ether.
Subtitles create more reach
Subtitles thus give videos greater reach by making them accessible to deaf and hard of hearing people, as well as to all those users who want or need to watch videos without sound. Moreover, adding subtitles enables you to make videos accessible in different languages more easily, thus allowing you to reach a wider audience. Instead of re-recording a video in another language using voiceover or dubbing, which is exceedingly time-consuming and costly, subtitles offer an efficient way to prepare video content in different languages.
Scale up the SEO of your videos
Videos without closed captions are not indexed by search engines like Google, and are thus not featured in search results. As a consequence, it is not enough to produce outstanding and relevant audiovisual content; it is also vital to ensure that your content can be found by users. Only by adding closed captions do videos become readable for search engines. This is the only way the video content can be evaluated by search engine algorithms to match relevant keywords in your videos to search queries. Considering that most users only look at the first hit list page in search queries, and in turn mainly click on the first three hits, closed captions have now become truly essential to ensure that your content reaches your target audience.
Subtitles make videos easier to understand
Subtitles also improve the comprehension of your content: It has been proven that when content is heard and read at the same time, comprehension is enhanced. Subtitles are also proven to help in learning a foreign language. Especially in the case of content for e-learning modules or educational purposes, or for content for non-native speakers, subtitles represent a great additional benefit.
Subtitles open up new uses for your video content
Video archives are invaluable, but the prerequisite to using them effectively is the ability to search within them. Subtitles make video archives searchable and thus efficient to use from the outset. But subtitles also make it possible to find excerpts in videos quickly and easily, that you can then use as quotes for social media clips or in blog posts. In addition, subtitles are the perfect starting point to translate videos into other languages, thus rendering them accessible to a wider audience.
So tap into the full potential of your videos by adding subtitles.
