How To Get More Traffic With Elegant Captions And Subtitles

Hey everybody, Sheryl Plouffe here. I am so glad that you're here for this training. This is a comprehensive training about captions and subtitles, and this is going beyond the YouTube video that I did where I showed you how to colorize your captions on Facebook. This is really a more comprehensive training that I want to do. I've got Carly actually with me today, and— hi Carly! Hi! Carly, you're not the only one who's asked me about this, so I think that's why I'm excited to be able to share this information, because these are the types of things—

captions and subtitles—

titles that can really help you for a lot of different reasons in terms of SEO benefits, let's say, to your videos, and also just to be able to capture people's attention. So this is gonna be a comprehensive training to show you some really cool stuff that I've discovered for my own self. But please feel free to jump in and ask questions, right? If you have questions or something's unclear, please do jump in and let me know. Otherwise, I'm gonna just kind of do this demonstration and show you some really cool stuff. Are you excited?

Yes, great.

Can't wait. You know what? Let me ask you actually before we do jump into the training. What was it about captions and subtitles that had you reach out to me to ask more about it? What was it about it that you thought, I really know I need to be doing this?

I, because I'm one of those that my husband goes to bed earlier than I do. And so I'm the one laying in bed scrolling and not able to listen to videos. So I know I am one of those that appreciates subtitles so much. And, but from the other standpoint of the marketing side, I want to be able to have people hear/read the information if they're also in that same boat where they aren't able to listen at that time.

Yeah. And you know what? I'm glad that you brought that up because I actually wrote down some reasons why we would want to use captioning and subtitles. So here are 3 reasons why we want to use these. You just mentioned one of them, the fact that it got— it gets attention. People now are— we're all on our phones and we're all scrolling through and we're, we're almost really looking for that person who's going to capture our attention. And so we want to be those people from a marketing perspective. So yes, out of the autoplay feature, especially on Facebook as an example, It's, you know, when people are scrolling through, they are seeing the videos will autoplay, but there's no audio until they actually press it to hear the audio. So there's also a statistic I found that Facebook and Nielsen did a survey. They found that up to 47% of the value in a video campaign was delivered in the first 3 seconds. Mm-hmm. So if that's the case, then it's all that much more important to grab the attention and stop that scrolling pattern. That we're seeing. So again, you know, we have to really capitalize on that first 3 seconds. We also need to be mindful of the autoplay feature. And then the third benefit is increased SEO benefits. So from a search engine optimization standpoint, there are statistics to show that when you add captions and subtitles, it actually helps you to get your video to rank higher. So that's really important. So lots of reasons why we would want to do it. So let's get into the how to do it right now. And I'm going to show you 2 things, the YouTube side of it and also the Facebook side of it. And I'm going to show you a really cool trick to be able to save tons of time in the creating of the captioning. Now, there's lots of different ways you can create captions. You can actually go to, you know, a company. I think Rev.com comes to mind. There's all kinds of different transcription services. They typically charge like $1 a minute. But this method that I'm going to show you actually eliminates the need to get a third party involved. A little bit of work on our part, but not extensive. So let's just jump in.

Okay.

All right. So I'm going to share my screen. And I'm going to share— I think if I share just my desk— actually, no, if I just share desktop, that should work. OK. Because then our images stay on the side there. All right. So what we're going to do is Start things off on YouTube. Now, let's presume you have a channel. Let's presume you've uploaded a video. So I'm at that stage right now on my screen. So this is, again, this is a video that was set to private. So this isn't publicly seen, but it's still gonna be a great tool that we can use to demonstrate what we're trying to do here. So I'm gonna follow along with my notes here as well 'cause I don't wanna miss any steps. So you've uploaded your video and here it is. And what you want to do is you can actually— before we actually get into the nuts and bolts of it, I want to show you a really cool thing where if you go over to the little gear icon, see it says Settings? If you click that and you go up to Subtitles, see here, see it says Off? If you click that and go to Options, look what you get. You can change the font.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, it doesn't give you a ton of options.

Okay, well, it's better than nothing.

Better than nothing. And, you know, depending on your brand and depending on the look and feel that you're developing in your own marketing, one of these may be more suitable than the default one. So it's worth looking at these selected font families. Font color— so you can change the font color. I've checked— I've kept my font color as white. But look how you can change it to any color, right? You can also go in here and you can change the size. You can change the background color. I did change the background color because magenta just happens to be my brand color. So it made sense for me to change my— and you can actually see an example. Oh, actually, no, that's— I did that in my own editing system. But you'll see in a moment how the magenta color comes up on the background of my captions. So you can change that.

Cheryl, sorry, I have a quick question about that. So when you— make the change— or sorry, when— let's say you were to change it to blue. Yeah. Is that only going to appear when you watch it, or are you also choosing that color for everyone else to watch it in that same way?

This is choosing it for everybody else to see that same way. Because once I changed mine to magenta, then that became the default. And now every time I do captions, it comes up with the magenta background.

Great. OK.

Thank you. Yeah. So background, opacity, window color, there's all different types of things here, options. So something to look into if you want to take advantage of, again, the ability to brand the look and feel of your captions. And especially if you've already decided on a brand color and you're trying to integrate that look and feel across your platforms, this is a great way you know, really easy way actually to give your videos that extra bit of branding elements to them. Cool. Okay, so that's the first thing I wanted to show you. Now I'm also— I'm just gonna look at my notes. So we did that. So now what we do is we go back to our video, and what we're going to do is we're going to choose CC. See, here's the subtitles, closed caption. Click on that. And what we want to do here is add new subtitles. So I'm going to click on that. Now, keep in mind, I haven't— this is a video I have not done captioning to already. OK, so let's presume that your video has no captions on it already. This is what it will look like. So you hit that and you'd go English in this case. And it's going to come up here. Create new subtitles or closed caption. Click that. Now we're at this stage here where sometimes this doesn't work on the first try. Let's hope that for the purpose of this training that it does. Let's see. I find it's like 50/50 and I don't know why. But sometimes when you hit the Actions button and you hit Auto-generate, it generates the subtitles for you automatically and sometimes it won't. So let's keep our fingers crossed. Oh, it did it! Yes! Yay! So I don't know why, but sometimes I've done it— I don't know if it has to do with internet signal, I don't know, but sometimes it doesn't work. I have to come back and I've got to refresh a few times.

Okay.

Or I come back and then I just keep trying until this auto-generation happens. Luckily for us, it happened on the first try here. Good. What happened here is that it automatically generated the transcription of everything I said in this video. Now, it's not perfect because as you see when you scroll through, you'll see, like for example, typically when I look through this, it doesn't capture my name, Cheryl Plouffe. Like Cheryl Cliff or something like that.

Spelled wrong.

Spelled wrong. So I usually will go through this and I'll look at it, and depending on how particular you are about grammar, you can, you can go in here and make it perfect, or you could just decide, um, I'm just going to just, just leave it without, you know, without periods and without capitalized first letters. It's up to you, but basically what you do is that the, the basis of it is here, and you would go through here and make sure that it's you know, clearly captioned properly. But what's nice about this, it saves time because it's already— the foundation's there. Now you just need to go through and just tweak it. And what's cool is that, let's say at the top here, and just make sure if my— Do you struggle with marketing your business effectively online? So what may be missing is video. You've been thinking about— So it's not bad, it's Matching pretty well.

I love that it tracks, like it goes along with the words.

Yeah. And if you get— yeah, exactly. Like, oh, there's a part here that I need to change. You just click it and you would just type in the word to change it. So it typically does a pretty good job, especially if— again, I'm a, you know, I'm a trained broadcaster, so I suppose I'm pretty clear when I speak. And, you know, if you don't speak too quickly, it's probably gonna get it near perfect from the get-go, which is great because it saves a ton of time. There will occasionally be a word that it just doesn't capture. It could be, you know, something that's again, you know, proprietary to you, or, you know, if you have an unusual name like my last name, it doesn't pick it up. So then you've gotta go through, or website addresses is a good one. So it won't capture like at the end of a video, if I do a call to action and I say, please visit me at CherylPlouffe.com, It's not going to capture that. I do have to go back in and actually type that through. OK. OK. So let's say you go through and it's what you want. So then all you do is you go up here and you say Save Changes. So I've saved those subtitles and they're published now to that video.

OK.

Okay? Now, what's interesting about this process is that by having started with the YouTube portion where we have the captions now associated with our video in YouTube, there's a way to download a file and upload that file to Facebook so you don't have to caption your— video in Facebook, it's going to do it for you.

Oh, awesome.

Yeah. So let's go through that process. So here's the video. Let's actually— let's just go back. I'm just curious because you would ask me, does the— do the captions always show that same color? Let's just go back and make sure. It should. I want to ensure that that's the case. So let me find that particular video. Again because here it is. Yes, see how it's— oh yeah, right, so it's got that magenta color and the white font. That's how I chose to.

And the spacing is perfect, right, of your name and your title.

Well, actually, it's interesting because watch what happens. It will, it'll come down. Yeah, got it. Yeah, but isn't that See, I'm just toggling over it, but when I let go, it drops down as a proper lower third. But I mean, really, it's amazing to be able to brand— yeah, to be able to brand your caption like that in whatever color. I don't know what your colors are, but if that's an option for you, definitely want to take advantage of that. So at this point—

Really quick too, sorry.

Oh no, go ahead. It was really fast.

Yeah, the whole process was really quick. Now, can I ask a question about this part of it? So when I uploaded my video onto one of my email sequences, the closed caption wasn't automatically playing for others. Like I had to instruct them to make sure the CC was clicked. So that they could see it. Is there a way that that can automatically play for everyone else?

Hmm, it's a good question. I, I don't know. I know what you mean because right here, see how mine has the red line underneath right now? It's, it's, if I unclick that, it's not going to show the subtitles, right? I think that's your point, is that, yep, you know, you, so basically you embedded your YouTube video in with a link in your email. Correct. And then they're clicking the link. I don't know of a way to automatically ensure that the subtitles are defaulted. Okay. Yeah, I don't know of that offhand. It's something I could look into, but I know that on videos that I, you know, have looked back on here, I do have to make sure that this is underlined, otherwise it won't play. So I think that they would have to to ensure that that's pressed to see the subtitles. Okay, that's not the case on Facebook though. Great. Yes, so on Facebook, once you have embedded captions on the Facebook video, it will always be there. Great. Yeah, that's my understanding. Yeah. So now that we know, okay, great, this worked, right? So we've got our nice captions on it. What we'll do is we'll go back to subtitles here. Um, and we're going to go to the published, not the automatic ones, but the ones we did, which is this second one here called English, right? It's in English. So we're going to do is we're going to come here and we're going to go back to the actions box and you're going to download an SRT file. Okay, going to get a little technical here, but it's not, it's not complicated. It's really quite simple. So what we want to do, and the reason why— let me just, let me just show you why we'd want to do that— is that because if we go over here, let me see if I even— I don't think I have this video up. Uh, I gotta find a video that I can just sort of, um, show you with here. Um, I guess it doesn't really matter which one. So, if we go— now I'm in Facebook. Let's presume that this is the same video. It's not, but let's just presume it's the same video because we're gonna wanna upload the same video to YouTube and to Facebook. But then what we would do is we would go over here to the gear setting, more settings. Oh, hang on, I think I'm getting ahead of myself here. Hang on a second. I'm getting ahead of myself. This part. You go to publishing tools and this is in your page. This is on my page. Yes, this is on my Facebook page.

Correct.

Business page. OK. Yeah. You go to video library and then you would hover over— see here, it says again, it could be any video, but let's presume that it's the same video that we're talking about here. You would go over and you'd hover. You don't see it until you hover over. See where it says Edit Video. And this is under Video Library, Publishing Tools, Video Library, and then you're looking for the video in question. You go Edit Video. And then down here, Captions, and it allows you—

after you've already uploaded—

I'm sorry, after you've uploaded, yes.

And do you want to upload it from YouTube, or do you want to upload it from a different way?

You want to upload your video from your computer to YouTube, which we presumably have already done. We also want to upload our video from Facebook— sorry, from our computer to Facebook the same way we did for YouTube.

Okay, so like if it was QuickTime Player or something?

Yes, well, you want an MP4. You want your video to be an MP4 format. Okay, so we're doing this training coming from a place where we're presuming that we've got the completed MP4 video already. —got it, sorry, okay— let's presume, and you want to upload it to YouTube, and then you also want to upload it to Facebook natively or directly from your computer to Facebook, because if you don't do that, you're missing out on a huge opportunity for free traffic to get in more people's news feeds, because Facebook does not want to see YouTube links on Facebook. Very bad.

They don't own each other, right? No, they—

Facebook, Facebook is doing everything they can to give YouTube a run for its money right now. So they want to see original content coming on their platform. They don't want to see links because then you're going to go to YouTube. So there's no advantage for you there. If anything, it could be detriment. So you want to have it appear to Facebook as if, nope, this is an original video. That came from my computer that I'm uploading to Facebook. And when you do that, you get exponentially more reach. So you get more people's newsfeeds. It's already fairly low because now Facebook is on a pay-to-play platform. It's the organic reach declined years ago. But still, if you want to have a chance of getting even into 16% of people's newsfeeds, you've got to have your own original content. Like, I don't know the stats, but if it was a YouTube link, I mean, it would probably be near zero.

You're probably not even gonna— That's a great tip though. That's a really great— Yeah, that's great info to know. Okay.

Yeah, so definitely. And when you upload your video to Facebook, then this is the process that we're gonna get to where we want to upload an SRT file. So it allows you here, it says Facebook says, Okay, now you've uploaded a video and you want to add captions to it. Give us an SRT file and we'll do it for you. So that's why we're going back to over to YouTube to say, okay, let's make an SRT file. Mm-hmm. Okay. So it's back into actions. We say SRT. So we're going to create a file. This is what it looks like. It's pretty basic. It's just got time codes and it's associated with the video. So what you'll do in this case is you will just— this document that's generated, you'll save it. So we'll go Save As. Now what I do is I actually have a folder on my computer called SRT Files. I keep all of my files in that folder just to keep things organized, frankly. So if I go to here, right? And I'm— so there's my file. If I would— I'm going to call it the same name as my video, right? So I can't remember what the name of the video was now, but let's just say it was called, you know, "How to Make Captions," right? And if I could type, then— okay, so it's— You know, let's say it's that and I want to save it into this folder. Do I have to double-click? No, I don't think so. So, oh, there, SRT files, blah blah blah. So you can see I made a whole bunch of others. The thing that you want to note here is, see how this one here shows a good example. See the extension at the back? It's like the name of the file, .en in lowercase, underscore, capital US, .srt. So that's what we want to save this as. Hmm. Okay. So en_US.srt. I'm saving it into my— again, you can call it whatever folder you want to call it. If you want to stay organized, that's fine. But But the important thing to note is that it does have to have this extension on it. OK. OK. So now I go save. OK, great. That's saved. I can close that out now. I can go over to Facebook. And again, presuming that you go through the process of uploading a video just as you normally would, there's nothing different or unusual about that. You just take that same video and upload it to Facebook. But then you get into the sort of the innards of it, the background of the video. And this is where you get to these different options for the video. Captions, advanced, cross-posting. You could create— you know, this is where you put your custom thumbnail. But what we want in this case is captions. And then we're going to say, yes, we want to upload an SRT file. So I'm going to go to my file folder called SRT files. And I'm going to find the one I just made. And I'm going to choose it. And then, oh, it says I've already added captions for this, so it's not allowing me to. But if you did not already have captions, which would be your case, then you would say here, and they would say default language, you would choose English. Make sure that's checked, and you'd hit save. And that's it. Wow. Yeah. So now what you have is you've got your videos that have— let me go back here. Now what you've got is captions and subtitles on both YouTube— there's my YouTube— YouTube and Facebook that are branded, that, you know, that look the color that you want them to look. And I've got to show you that part, actually. So We did the branding of the captions on YouTube, but just to show you how to do that branding part on Facebook, you— yeah, there's a little step here. You'd have to go to the actual video. So we're going to go here. And let me find— Hi, everyone. It's Sheryl Buff here, video marketing consultant. So just let me go. Let's say it was probably not a good one example because this one's already done. But in any case, let's just pick a video. Hey everybody. Okay, you'd go again to that. This is the part I was showing you too soon before you go here. Icon, you go to more settings. And then here you go to edit and allow you to choose a color. In my case, I chose magenta again. So it's really the same caption branding process we did on YouTube, except now we're doing it on Facebook. We're kind of— and again, we're just setting the default. You don't have to do this every single time. Just you do it once and then forevermore until you change it again. Your captions will always look the same. Oh, cool. Yeah, so you can choose white, yellow, whatever. The opacity, you can change the text color, the text size. This one does not give you a font choice. OK, the YouTube one did. It gave not many choices, but it gave us a few choices. This one is just pretty much what it is. You can change the color, but at least it's something. And then you hit Save Changes and you don't have to do that again. So branding element that we're doing on the captions for both, it's like a set it and forget it type of thing. But also you don't have to do it for any of your future videos. No, it's all done. Oh, awesome. Okay. Yeah. So now when you go back to your Facebook page, you're going to see that every time you upload— um, let's make sure this is down— every time you upload, uh, videos and you add the captions, like, like in the process I just showed you, they'll all come up pink or magenta or white or black, whatever you choose. So the one that you did already Like, for example, let's just see, see how this one comes up. See how that looks. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So it's already done for you. Very cool. Yeah.

So you don't have to check it or edit it or anything. It's just going to come out the same way that the YouTube one did with—

Yeah, well, because, because in the YouTube, we did the work in the YouTube side of it. And when we downloaded that SRT file, it was already edited. Got it. OK. You don't have to redo that process. You don't have to scan through and make the changes on YouTube and then again on Facebook. You just do it once on YouTube, export that SRT file, and upload it to Facebook. It's already edited with the correct spelling of your name and the website address and all of that. Great. So this, this saves so much time. Yes, it does. It does. It saves a ton of time and it makes your videos look like you hired someone to do this for you. Mm-hmm. Listen, there are other ways you could add captions and subtitles and annotations in the editing process, but imagine how long that would take. Oh yeah. If you were in your editor and you wanted to put up a lower third at the bottom of your screen for everything you said in a, in a 3-minute video. Oh my God, you'd be there forever, right? So I actually recently encountered somebody who was doing that. I was like, oh no, no, no, no, please don't do that because you're going to drive yourself crazy and it's going to take hours.

So I, you know, yeah, I did that too. Yeah, so you don't—

yeah, you have to, um, you want to make it much more efficient than that. Um, and then I guess the other benefit of it, you're not hiring someone for $1 a minute.

Well, I did that too, and all they did was the YouTube stuff. And I thought, oh, I paid you $24 to do something I already know how to do, which I wanted them to do this for Facebook, and they said, oh, we don't do that.

Well, look how easy it is. It's so easy! So I discovered this because I am a systems kind of person. Like, I love to find solutions to problems. I'm obsessed with it, frankly. And so I was seeing, I think it was probably Gary Vaynerchuk, who probably, you know, I love Gary V. I think he had some captions. I was like, how are they doing that? Like, hmm. So I started kind of investigating, and I love to, I'm a journalist by profession, so I like to dig, and I like to research, and I like to find solutions, and I like to find ways to fix problems. And so I ended up kind of digging this stuff up. I had to learn about SRT files. I had to learn about all this stuff, and I'm like, Wait a minute, what if you take that and you put it on? And then it worked. I'm like, this is amazing. Yes. Yeah. So it's exciting. And I like— this is sort of my thing. Like, I really love to do that. So what I've done now is I've incorporated this into my signature program to show people how to do this because a big part, you get better SEO optimization. You know, you stop the scroll. Like, if that video— and listen, you can use this on your Facebook page, YouTube, wherever. People are— if there's a caption and they can see it without having to hear the audio, they're likely to be more engaged with it. They might hit, you know, on Facebook, they might hit it to hear the audio. It's also more accessible for people who can't hear. Right? So there's just so many benefits to being able to do captions. I actually, on a Facebook ad video, had captions like this running. So imagine now you're doing Facebook ads and your video has color captions that are branded to you. I mean, it just elevates the look and feel of what you're doing on video, you know, takes it to the next level. So it's really exciting.

So it doesn't take that long to do it. Like, why not do it? Yeah.

You know, the only thing I would say is that if your video is really long, which in this day and age we don't want them to be long, right? We don't— people are not engaging with 8-minute videos anymore unless it's Facebook Live. But I'm just talking about recorded videos. We want to keep those recorded videos 3 minutes or less, preferably 2 minutes and less. Now, you know, things have changed. People's attention spans, like they say, it's like the attention span of a goldfish. So we need to— and we just talked about that statistic off the top with the the 3-second thing where we need to capture people's attention in the first 3 seconds. And so we want to keep those videos as short as possible. Let's say it is— let's say it's a minute and a half, which when I was, you know, a news manager, that's what I always had our reporters do was a minute and a half. And actually, we went down to a minute at one point. So we want them to be fast and quick. So when you do a fast and quick video, it doesn't take that long to scan through the auto-generated captions. It's already done for you. Like, not that much text really in a 1.5-minute video, for example. So it's pretty easy. It auto-generates. You scan through it. It might take you probably less than a minute, right? Less than a minute. You scan through, you're like, yep, no, you play it and you're like listening, yeah, no, it sounds good. Oh, there's a word needs fixing, type. Okay, keep going. That process might take a minute. Yeah, it's very fast.

So are you going to do captions for this one?

Yeah, I probably will. Yeah, of course, that would make total sense. You're farther ahead of me than I am. But it's true. I mean, like, I didn't even think about this before. I've talked about the other benefits, but you save money. Oh yeah. You know, let's say you just gave a good example of Well, you know, I paid someone $24 to caption this video and they only did half of really what I wanted them to do because they weren't even willing to do the other half. And it could be, let's say you wanted to do, you know, even just one video a week, that's $100 a month and that's $1,200 a year. Yes. So, hmm, you know what I mean?

It's like, I'd rather take less than 10 minutes, yeah, to do both videos on both platforms, then— Right. Waste $1,200. Exactly.

And second to that, you know, if— and I don't know if you're at the stage where you have a, you know, a virtual assistant or you have someone who's helping you with— but you could easily show them this process and have them do it for you if you got to that point. Really, it's so simple. Just create a document to instruct them, or you could just show them this video. Hey, the process I want for each of my videos going forward. Great. Yeah. So I hope that's helpful for you very much. Now, for those of you— so, Carly, I'm glad that you were here and you asked some great questions. And I thank you for your participation in this. And for those of you who want to— let me just share— stop sharing this for a second. For those of you who are watching this tutorial, and you want to get in touch with me about how to, you know, take your business to the next level with video marketing, social media, personal branding, I'd love to talk to you. So I'll put up a banner on the screen here for a way that you can get in touch with me for a free 30-minute strategy call. And it's calendly.com/cherylplouffe. And I'd be happy to jump on the phone with you and give you a free action plan for how you can really start taking advantage of video and being able to really put yourself out there with confidence so that it takes your business to the next level. So thank you guys so much for joining me today. Thank you, Carly, for being a great participant in this tutorial, and I appreciate your time today. Thank you, Sheryl. Thank you.