1. 83% of social media users listen to videos with no sound

In a world where we now mostly consume online content via our smart phones, we could be anywhere – on the bus to work, at school, or lying in bed in at night when we’re supposed to be sleeping. Each of these times aren’t exactly optimal for loud video consumption, and you’re ultimately given two options: rifle through your bag or your room for your earphones, or simply pray that the video has captions on it. Should your videos lack captioning and thus not be optimised for non-audio viewing, you are willingly losing a lot of your audience.

2. captioning your content makes it more accessible

Of course, captions were primarily created in order to make those who are deaf or have other hearing difficulties have access to the videos. By doing this, you are optimising your content to a much larger audience, whilst also being compassionate and considerate.

3. Captioned videos can help to make you smarter

It’s true! Research shows that captioning videos help viewers retain more facts and information, and even help to build vocabulary and a greater understanding of grammar – a bit like reading a book!

4. Captioning videos can help to keep your audience’s attention

Let’s face it – in a digital age where our attention spans are getting smaller due to companies in every direction grappling for our attention and around-the-clock accessibility to many forms of media, it can be hard to remain focused. Captioned videos are reported to retain this attention, as demonstrated by the fact that videos with captions tend to have a longer viewing time than those that don’t.

5. They can help develop language skills

Reading closed captions is a great way for viewers to expand their vocabulary. Whether you are a non-native speaker, or a child or adult who is learning to read, captions can help you to develop a command in the language, and they can teach you common words and terms, as well as how verbs, nouns, adjectives and tenses work, for example.

6. Captions also boost your SEO!

Of course, Google and other search engines cannot watch the video for you, and so they cannot crawl your video in the ways they could crawl your blog posts, for example. This means that you are losing out on prime opportunities to rank well on search engines. By using captions, search engines are then able to easily obtain information via the text within the video; index it and thus increase your keyword density.

7. There is a huge potential growth via keywords strategy!

That’s right – since so much of online media is not already captioned, using specific keywords or key terms within your captions means that your content could be much exposed to inorganic traffic and the opportunity to garner much more views than you would without. For example – if you were to use terms such as ‘Glasgow Restaurant’ and ‘Great Food’, you are much more likely to receive traffic from those looking for exactly that, and not just from your organic traffic, who merely come across your video.

8. Captioning helps to keep up with the industry’s standards

Everything is becoming a lot more accessible to the public now – keyboard accessibility tools; text enlargement; motor impairment navigation tools, for example. To be posting videos today without captions excludes a large amount of people, which we have already covered, and there shouldn’t really be any excuse for it anymore, considering the competitiveness of the market.

Need help with adding captions to your content? Contact us at Artemeis Media today!