From the course: Getting the Most out of Video on Facebook

The purpose of captions on Facebook - Facebook Tutorial

From the course: Getting the Most out of Video on Facebook

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The purpose of captions on Facebook

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- Using captions on your Facebook video is a great way to extend the reach of the video, for a variety of communities. The goal is to make video accessible. According to the 2010 Census in the U.S., nearly 19% of Americans can be classified as having some sort of disability that can make it difficult for them to access content. This can include impairments from birth, by accident, or via old age. Being able to access content on the internet greatly affects the quality of their life, and the numbers are going to be even higher in other areas of the world or potentially lower, but in general, almost one out of five folks will have some difficulty consuming content on Facebook. For many, the accessibility is critical to their ability to perform their job, or for quality of life. Many of your customers may be blind or visually impaired, deaf or hard-of-hearing, cognitively impaired, or have some physical dexterity challenges. Now Facebook does its best to make content accessible, they'll offer alt tags and the ability for content to be used with screen readers, different ways to physically start and stop a video. But there are things you can do as well. With hearing impairments, you need to realize that a hearing impairment can be a partial or total inability to hear sound. A deaf person has little to no hearing. And hearing loss can be temporary or permanent. This is why we have captions. Captions covert the spoken word into visible text, and that text is synchronized to the video itself. Captions will appear on screen, and generally they describe what's being said, but they can also provide extra information, such as describing the sounds effects, or the ambient noise. They're used to display dialogue, identify who's speaking, and describe any relevant sound. The captions are always synchronized to the video image. Web video can have open or closed captions, the ability that these can be turned on or off, and made visible. But it's not just those with an auditory impairment that can benefit from captions. Just about everyone can take advantage of captions and it can improve the reach of your video. So exactly who benefits? Well of course those who are dear or hard of hearing will benefit from captions. But those who are traveling, people in a taxicab, at the airport you'll see captions turned on because it's just impossible to hear the sound of the televisions. People who speak a foreign language may find it easier to read the captions and quickly translate than trying to keep up with the spoken word. Those that are studying a new language, or those have difficulty processing audio information. Social media consumers also benefit from captions. Often when people are taking a look at content at work, or on mobile devices, they may not be able to hear. There could be a lot of environmental noise or they may be muted. Captions or visible text can pull people into the video. Accessible videos are also a lot more indexable. Now video tends to take longer to produce so Google gives it a higher search engine result, because of higher quality. People also tend to spend an average of two minutes on websites that host videos, which is longer than the content they spend when just looking at text. Videos with captions tends to double the number of people that actually finish watching a video. And the search ranking is tied to how much time people spend on your website. So making the video more accessible means people spend more time with it, thus driving up your page views and time on site.

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