Enable Instagram's auto-generated captions on IGTV to boost engagement and reach hearing-impaired viewers. Turn on captions in Settings, then toggle them during upload or after publishing via the three-dot menu. The captions are auto-generated and can't be edited in-app, so they may contain errors.
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Closed captions are a great way to increase engagement on your IGTV videos, as well as a host of other benefits such as expanding your reach to a whole new audience. The hearing-impaired audience, for example. Of course, they're relying on captions in order to understand and comprehend the content at hand. Mobile viewing in public. A lot of people are using their mobile devices in public places and don't want to be listening to the audio for everyone around them to hear, so captions are are a great way to appeal to that audience as well. Also, videos that are on autoplay are muted. And so this is a great way to, of course, expand your content to people who are listening to videos that are autoplaying but are muted. So there are a whole host of reasons why closed captions, as opposed to open captions, are beneficial to you. So open captions are when we have captions on the screen, but they're embedded into the actual— they're baked into the file, and that requires editing or it requires a third-party app. What we're talking about today, though, are closed captions, and closed captions are really an extra layer of captions that can be turned on or off. You'll see this sometimes on YouTube videos, for example. Well, now you can do the same thing with IGTV videos, and we're going to show you how to do that today. So I'm mirroring my phone onto the screen so that you can see this, these, these closed captions, this extra track, this separate track of captions that you can turn off and on. So let's play this out and we will walk through what it looks like on my mobile device. So I'm in Instagram. The first thing you're going to go do is go to settings and then go to account. So click on the account setting and you're going to want to go to captions. When you get to the captions, make sure that the toggle button is turned to auto-generated captions. So you want that to be turned on. Once that's complete, we're going to go back now as if we were uploading an IGTV video. So I'm just using, using an example here just randomly in my camera roll. So I'm going to upload an IGTV video. And in this case, I'm just choosing one of my client videos of them playing with their beautiful dog. You can, of course, scroll across and choose whatever cover photo you'd like for your particular post, and then you're gonna hit next. Make sure that you go to— you can set up the title, you know, you can choose your title. You want to add like a little bit of your description and just kind of go through the regular process of, of doing your IGTV video. Then you're gonna scroll to the bottom where it says advanced settings. Click on advanced settings and then make sure again that the toggle button is set to auto-generated captions. So once you're happy with that and you've completed the process, you can hit next and it's going to start to post that video. Now, in the interest of not sitting here watching the paint dry, I've uploaded a video that I can give you an example of what that looks like on a previous upload of mine. So here's a video that I've already uploaded to IGTV. I'm clicking on the three little dots at the bottom of the screen. And when you click on that, it brings up a little menu bar where you'll be able to see the auto-generated captions toggle button, whether it's on or off. And now, as you can see here in black with white text, are the closed captions that are overlaid on top of this particular IGTV video. So you're going to go into manage captions in order to access that little popup window to determine whether those auto-generated captions are on or off. The only thing I would say about this is that they are auto-generated, so there may be some sections in here that need tweaking. Unfortunately, to this point, I have not found a way to go in and tweak those captions to this point. So if I do find an update to that dilemma, I will be, of course, the first to let you know. So the next IGTV-related video that you should watch is the Facebook Creator Studio and an IGTV tutorial for you right here. Have a watch.
