No Captions on Facebook Ads or YouTube? You’re Killing Performance

Did you know that, on Facebook, 70% of your audience has their sound turned off? 

In this ParaCore ad example, it’s over 80%!

So, when your Facebook ad autoplays, if you have no captions, how can your viewer understand what you’re trying to sell them? 

What about YouTube ads? People expect to watch and view videos, so why do captions matter? 

Here, it’s all about Google. Captions in your YouTube videos have the power to boost your Google ranking and SEO. 

Across the board, when you add captions, you’re improving your campaign.

So, let’s review how to include captions in your Facebook and YouTube videos!

Here’s the ParaCore Facebook page, where you can see the captions of a recent video (and my eyes closed, apparently!) 

Head over to Publishing Tools, click through to Video Library, and then Edit Video. 

This is what you’ll see next. 

Over here on the right, we see Video Details, Thumbnail, Distribution, and Subtitles & Captions. Here’s where I can upload my own subtitle file.

You might be wondering: why not choose to auto-generate or write? 

Unfortunately, neither Facebook nor YouTube is great at auto-generating captions! You’re prime to get a bunch of punctuation, grammar, and spelling errors when you go that route, which can damage your campaign.  

Sure, you could write them yourself, but it can take forever!

ParaCore tip: We recommend Rev.com, which does transcriptions, captions, foreign subtitles, and translation for a dollar per minute, 24-hour turnaround time, 99% accuracy. 

Here’s how it works: upload the video to YouTube first. 

Then, go to Rev.com, place an order, and select the video you want from YouTube. 

Then Rev.com will caption it, send it back to YouTube and enable it!

So, that’s YouTube covered, but what about Facebook captions? 

On Rev.com, review your Order History and select the file you want to download. You’ll be presented with these choices. 

You want to choose a Subrip file; save it as a .srt file on your computer.  

ParaCore tip: If you ever look at the actual SRT file, you’ll see your transcription, along with brackets and timestamps, to ensure that the text shows up at the correct time in the video. Pretty cool! 

Then just return to your Facebook Video Library, and Edit, and upload the .srt file to the video! 

So, to recap:

• Videos on Facebook should have captions because the viewer’s sound is likely off. 
• With YouTube, captions help to boost SEO.
• Don’t auto-generate them and don’t write them yourself. Use rev.com. 

That’s your crash course on captions and why they’re important! 

Got more questions? Reach out to us!