Information transmission through subtitles plays an important role not only for feature films nowadays, but is also more and more important for video content and social media. Advertising, brand positioning and other links have their place here. Subtitles not only give influencers more leeway, but also a means to increase engagement and reach.
Subtitles not only have the advantage that representations in videos can be underlined so that the desired message can also be understood by the user. The moving images also have a positive effect on the viewer. For a part of the population, this type of moving image caption is essential for health reasons: Approximately 28 million people in the USA are deaf or hard of hearing. According to the German Deaf Association, there are a good 80,000 deaf people in Germany. 16 million people suffer from hearing loss here.
Furthermore, subtitles make it possible to access video material from anywhere. Many users access Facebook or Instagram videos while on the go, for example on public transport. Videos are muted and can still be understood without any problems thanks to the subtitles. Understanding is also supported with strong accents and even users who are fluent in the language often like to use subtitles.
As a content maker, however, care should be taken to adapt the language to the target audience when it comes to subtitles.
As mentioned earlier, language also drives engagement and reach. To boost brand equity and increase reach, translation into Chinese or Spanish is widely considered to be very beneficial. The Arabic language is also being used more and more frequently and is used at least 5 percent. PLYMedia also found, based on statistics, that 66 percent of viewers watched videos without subtitles to the end, compared to 91 percent with subtitles present.
Uscreen provided further results, which refer to data from Instapage: According to this, videos with subtitles on Facebook would receive 26 percent more click-throughs for call-to-actions and also 15 percent more shares and 17 percent better reactions. The reach with caption increased by 16 percent.
Search engine optimization (SEO) also benefits from subtitles. Facebook Business or Google’s YouTube Support offer help for creating suitable subtitles in videos, but we recommend that you continue to create these subtitles yourself, which of course involves a lot more effort, but which is definitely worth it in retrospect.
