In this instructional video, video strategist Sheryl Plouffe demonstrates a quick workflow for reusing captions that were already created for a YouTube video and applying them to the same video on Facebook. She walks through the YouTube interface to download the existing subtitle file as an SRT, explains the required naming convention (.en_US.srt) for Facebook, and then shows how to upload that file in Facebook’s Subtitles & Captions section, selecting the language and saving the captions. Throughout, she emphasizes the time‑saving benefit of not recreating captions, the importance of captions for viewers who watch without sound, and invites viewers to engage with her for further video‑marketing help.
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Wanna know how you can repurpose your captions and your subtitles from your YouTube videos and easily bring them into your Facebook videos? I'm Sheryl Plouffe. I'm a video strategist. I'm gonna take you over to my computer and show you exactly how to do it. Okay, so let's say that you have published a video to YouTube, but now you are publishing the same video to Facebook and you want to add captions to your Facebook video. What you might not know is that there's a really easy way to do it because you've already done the work on YouTube. So once you have your video up on YouTube, I'm using this as an example here, this one that I, that I did, you're gonna go into the subtitles and CC section of your YouTube video and you'll click on the English subtitles or closed captioning. Again, presuming that you have already gone through this process, you've already subtitled your YouTube video But what I'm showing you now is how to easily take that and put it onto Facebook so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel on that platform. So once you're in Subtitles and CC, you're going to go to the Actions button and you're going to download the SRT file. So you click on SRT. What this is doing is now capturing all of the subtitles that you've put on your YouTube video and it's saving it in to your computer. So what I'll do here is I'll open this up, and what I do is I change the, the naming convention here to include, let's say the file is called, you know, what's it called, IGTV, or whatever the topic is, and then you'll do .en in small letters, underscore capital US, .srt. So that's the naming convention that you want to save this as. You can save it to wherever you'd like on your computer. In this case, I'll just leave it in Downloads, and it's going to save as this format. So now you can close this out. We're going to go back into Facebook now. So now I'm in Facebook, and I'm using— I'm going to just use an example. These are not the same videos, for the purpose of this demonstration, but let's say it is the same video. You come back and you find the same video that you've now published to Facebook, and you're gonna come in and add that file, that SRT file, so that the captions appear. So let's just say in this case, um, it's this video, and I'm just gonna go here. Okay, so they're not a match, but in your case it will be a match. So here's your video. What you'll do is you'll go over to Subtitles and Captions on the left-hand side. You will have to select the language, in this case English. English. And then under Add New Captions, you go to the Upload button and you will find the SRT file that we just saved, which is this one, and you'll click Open. And now those captions are being imported into the video on Facebook in this case. So it says here, uploaded, great, um, and then you can just go down here and hit save. I'm not gonna do that because I don't want these captions to appear on this video. But that's really how you can do it, and it's a really great way to save yourself a lot of time and effort. We all know that the majority of people actually watch videos with no sound on. So it's important to have captions on your videos so that people can consume your content, become engaged with you, and want to follow you. So I hope that's helpful for you. If you want to leave a comment or have a question, please feel free to do so under this video. I read all of the comments, and I hope that you will, um, visit me at CherylPlouffe.com or find me here on YouTube to subscribe here or come to my Facebook page and follow me there. I would love to connect with you and find more ways to help you to grow your business with video. Thanks so much. See you next time.
