Top Benefits of Using Closed Captions in Your Videos

If you've ever watched a video on YouTube and noticed that it had closed captions, then you know how beneficial they can be. 

Not only do closed captions help people who are hard of hearing consume your content, but they also increase your audience reach and provide more data for your marketing team.

Did you know that 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound? That's why it's important that you caption your videos if you want people to follow along. If you want to find out more about the benefits of adding closed captioning to video materials, and you are looking for a quick way to turn spoken words into text, this material is for you. Let’s dig deeper into closed captioning!

What are Closed Captions? (CC)

Closed captions are a text-based representation of the spoken part of a video. Closed captioning was created as a tool of video accessibility, to help the deaf and hard-of-hearing, but it can be used in a variety of scenarios. Captions, for example, can be read when audio is unavailable or when the viewers find themselves in noisy environments.

The use of closed captioning has grown over recent years as more public attention has been brought upon it by advocates such as actors Marlee Matlin and Julia Louis-Dreyfus (who both happen to be hard of hearing).

In fact, the Television Decoder Circuitry Act of 1990 requires that all televisions manufactured in the United States since 1993 include a built-in caption decoder if their picture tubes are larger than 13 inches.

Closed Captions Vs Subtitles

Closed captions and subtitles are oftentimes used interchangeably, but, in fact, they have different meanings. The primary distinction between subtitles and closed captioning is their purpose rather than their format. Whenever you see closed captions, they are located in the same place on the screen as subtitles. Closed captions are often displayed at the bottom of a video, but can also appear above or below it, depending on how your device is oriented.

Subtitles represent, in fact, the translation of the sound of the video file. Let’s say that you have recorded something in English and you want it to be easily understandable for a Spanish-speaking person. In this case, you will use and edit subtitles for your video.

While subtitles are mostly utilized for internationally produced content aimed at a global audience, closed captions are available to help viewers with hearing impairments or those who are unable to access audio while watching videos.

Benefits of Using Closed Captions in Your Videos

Closed captioning comes with multiple benefits for the video content, such as increased accessibility, improved SEO or even higher reach.

These are some reasons why video creators should consider adding closed caption files to their content:

1.   Improved SEO

SEO is an important part of marketing your videos. If you want to get more views, subscribers, and traffic to your website, SEO can help you do it. When people search for a specific topic or keyword on Google or YouTube, you want them to be able to find your video about that topic. If they don't see your video in the first few results in their search results, chances are they might not even click on one of the other results because it doesn't look relevant enough for what they were searching for. Who would have thought that something simple such as YouTube closed captioning can make your video rank better on  the search engine.

Closed captions improve how well videos rank in search engines because each word spoken by someone who appears in the video has been transcribed into text which can be used by Google and other search engines as keywords to help them determine whether this particular video is relevant enough that someone should watch it when searching for information related to those particular words!

2.   Increased Audience Reach

With closed captioning, your videos can reach a much wider audience. This is especially true for videos that have audio that isn't in English, or for those who have hearing difficulties. Moreover, people’s audio attention span is getting lower and lower, therefore, caption text is helping them  focus better on your video content.

Think about the TikTok closed captions. There are multiple individuals that simply scroll through TikTok without even having sound on, so a closed captioned video will ensure that such people can easily understand the message of the video and that they won’t scroll away immediately. 

Luckily for you, there are tool out there that can help with translating and generating subtitles for your video in multiple languages. You can watch the short video below to learn more about it, but we'll also include a more in-depth tutorial later on in the article:

3.   More Resources Available for Your Marketing Team

Closed captions are a great source of data for your marketing team. With closed captions, you can use this added information to improve your content, audience engagement and video marketing strategy. For example, you can compare the results of videos without captions and the results of videos with Instagram closed captions with the help of Instagram Insights, so you can get a better perspective on what performs well and what doesn’t for your specific type of content.

Moreover, if you want to engage and convert potential customers with video ads, adding captions to your videos will ensure that they can watch the ad in any location even without sound. 

4.   Get More Feedback on Your Content

By using closed captions in your videos, you'll be able to get more feedback on the content. You can use this to make sure that each video is as clear and easy-to-understand as possible.

You can also get feedback on the format of your videos: do they use too much text? Are they too long? Do they have enough images or not enough? All of these things will help you improve future videos so that they're even better than before!

Closed captions are also great for getting feedback on the quality of your work. Did someone misspell something? Is there an error somewhere in their script? Did somebody mess up during recording/editing/post-production? These errors can all be discovered with closed captions so you can fix them before publishing anything new!

5.   Helping the Hard of Hearing Consume Your Content

If you have the option, it’s worth using closed captions in your videos. Not only will they help users who speak English as a second language, but they can also benefit those who are hard of hearing. Closed captions make your content more accessible for these individuals and allow them to enjoy your video or podcast at the same level as everyone else.

You can also add a transcript to your video or podcast, which is helpful for users who may have missed something or are trying to find a specific quote from your content. Transcripts can be especially important when using closed captions, as they allow viewers to read along. For example, besides Vimeo closed captioning, you can also leave a full script (which you can find the caption file) in the description of your video.

Another tool to make your videos more deaf accessible is also through live captioning. But, for a simple clip, this might be a bit demanding. In television, a -stenographer or captioning service listens to the broadcast and enters a shorthand version into a program that transforms the shorthand into a transcription of the captions and adds that data to the television signal in order to provide live captioning.

6.   Make It Easier to Watch Videos in Loud Places

Closed captions can also be used to help people watch videos in loud places like bars and restaurants. It’s often difficult for people to hear what is being said on a video when there are other sounds in the background. Closed captions are there to assist them, so they don’t miss out on anything important. If you didn’t know this already, closed captioning is a type of text that displays words from a video or movie as it plays on the screen.

Closed captions provide access to audio-visual content for people who have difficulty hearing or understanding speech, especially when there is background noise present such as television shows, movies and online videos. 

Let’s think about a Twitch stream. Most of the time, people want to watch a video stream when it is live, however, the external environment can be a bit noisy. This is one of the times when Twitch closed captions come in handy.

The Closed Captioning Process with the Help of Flixier

Now that you know why closed captions are essential for your video materials, it is time to better understand the closed captioning workflow. You may not have anybody in-house who can handle your own closed captioning, or you may be approaching a deadline and just do not have the time. Even if you're really busy, getting closed captioning for your video production doesn't have to be an extra burden.

Thankfully, when you use a caption generator, such as Flixier, it only takes a couple of minutes to make your video accessible for a larger audience. Few things are more annoying than manually creating captions for videos, and we understand. That is why we included automated captions in Flixier. You don’t even have to download or install any apps to your computer.

With Flixier's numerous customization tools, you can automatically add subtitles or upload your own to any video and make them elegant and easy to read.

How to do that? Here are the steps you need to follow to enable closed captions with Flixier:

Upload Your Video

Click the blue Import icon to bring your video to Flixier for captioning. You'll be able to import a video from your PC, online storage, or even Twitch and YouTube. After you've chosen your video, click Import, and it will appear in your Library.

Create the Caption

Make a new project and move the video to the timeline. Select Generate Subtitles from the context menu. After your auto-generated captions are complete, you can manually edit them to change any errors or move them with your mouse. All you have to do is click on the caption that you want to modify and you can adjust the text on the right side of the screen.

Moreover, when it comes to captions, using our video caption generator gives you a plethora of customizing choices. Drag and drop to alter the size and position, choose from over 1000 fonts, change the color of the text, and add a backdrop color, all with a few clicks. 

Export the Captioned Video

When you're finished captioning your video, click the blue Export button to begin rendering. You can then save the video to your computer or post it to up to seven different online platforms. The rendering will take no more than 3 minutes!

Flixier - More than a Caption Generator

Yes, closed captions are essential for your videos, but the video editing journey is a lengthier one. Worry not, Flixier is a fully featured online video editor in addition to generating captions! You may crop, clip, and trim films, auto-generate English captions, add photos, text, animated graphics and text, logos, and much more.

With Flixier, all the features you need to create amazing videos that engage your audience are at your fingertips. In a matter of minutes, you can have a fully edited video, ready to be posted!

Aren’t you convinced yet? Try our free tool and make the most out of our video captioning and other editing features!