Easily Add Captions to Facebook Profile Page Videos

Did you know that 85% of Facebook videos are watched without sound?

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And are you aware that over 51 million individuals in the European Union are hearing impaired and require captions in order to make videos accessible?

How about this statistic: Facebook research shows that video captions increase view time by an average of 12%?

Whilst you might feel that adding captions to your Facebook videos is an extra step not worth your time, you’d actually get far more views when it has accurate captions. Captions increase viewership because:

• Your audience can watch the whole video with the sound off, which is common amongst commuters or workers.

• As Facebook videos auto-play on mute, you can catch a viewer’s attention easier when they are scrolling down their newsfeed.

• It makes the video accessible to those who can not hear well.

All of these reasons make captioning Facebook videos essential.

But how do you add captions to Facebook profile page videos? It is actually easier than you think. Here is an easy step-by-step guide to follow.

A Word About Facebook Automatic Captioning

You may have read that Facebook has an automatic captioning tool. Whilst this is technically true, the reality is that the tool is only available in English, only for Facebook Business Pages, and only for those located in the US and Canada.

Pretty limiting, huh?

This means if you want to add captions to your Facebook videos in another language or to a profile page, you cannot use the automatic captioning tool.

But don’t worry!

Luckily you can still add accurate captions with an SRT file. Here’s how.

Add Captions to Facebook Profile Page Videos

1. Transcribe Your Video

First, you will need an SRT file. This is a simple text file of the audio that is contained in your video. You can manually transcribe the audio to text yourself, but this is a time-consuming process.

Alternatively, you can hire an automatic transcription service provider, like Happy Scribe, to convert the audio to text for you.

Using Happy Scribe is quick and easy. And as a bonus, the software recognises 119 languages and accents. Meaning if you have a video in Arabic or Mandarin, it can provide you with a respective Arabic or Mandarin text transcript. Something Facebook’s automatic captioning also can’t do.

2. Upload Your Video

Next, log into your Facebook profile page and click on 'Photo/Video' at the top of your page timeline.

Then click on ‘Upload Photos/Video’ and select the relevant video from your computer. Facebook supports most video formats, but check first.

For now, put the 'Who should see this?' option to ‘Only Me’. We will change the privacy settings later.

There is no need to do anything else at this stage. We can do everything else in the editing stage.

3. Make Edits and Add Captions

After several minutes, click refresh to see if your video has loaded to your page. Once your video has appeared on your page click on the More > Videos button at the top of your timeline. This will take you to your video library.

Click on Your Videos

Find the video that you want to edit. Click on the Pencil/Edit tool in the upper right hand corner and click on ‘Edit this video’

This will open a new screen. From here you can tag people in the video, create a title, choose a thumbnail, add a location and date, and include a enhanced description.

Next you will be able to upload the SRT file. Note: You may need to change the file name. For example, as my Facebook profile page is based out of Great Britain it asked me to upload my SRT caption file using this format: filename.en_GB.srt

Finally, decide if you want to allow third-party websites to be able to embed your video, select a category for your video, change your video privacy setting, and hit save.

Your video should instantly appear on your Facebook Profile Page with your subtitles.

There you have it! A very easy way to add captions to Facebook profile pages. I must note here that the process for adding subtitles to your Facebook Business Pages is a little different. We will tackle how to do that later this week.

If you need help converting your video audio to text and with generating an SRT file, then let us know. Happy Scribe is here to help.