Facebook loves introducing new features just a little bit at a time – and that means sometimes, they slip under the radar!
In October 2016, for example, they started offering a ridiculously cool new feature to a handful of Pages, and now that feature is becoming widely available.
Hope you’re ready, because it’s a good old-fashioned rollout.
(No, not like that.)
As TechCrunch recently reported, Facebook is now offering a tool that should be pretty familiar to YouTube aficionados – a way to automatically generate captions for your videos, and edit them right inside Facebook.
It might not sound like a big deal, but this is kind of a huge leap forward for anyone who posts video to their Facebook Page, and it’s definitely something you should take advantage of!
Why this feature exists – and why you should use it
So, you can add captions to your videos so people can follow along without any sound.
Who cares, right? Isn’t that a little…old-timey?
Actually, providing captions for your videos is super important!
About 85% of all video on Facebook is watched on mute – so if you can’t understand yours with the sound off, they probably aren’t that appealing to the majority of users!
Videos play without sound by default on both desktop and mobile – and whether they don’t have their headphones handy, they’re listening to something else, or they just plain prefer a little peace and quiet, viewers typically don’t switch the sound on.
So ask yourself: which one of these is easier to understand?
(If you said the one on the left, congrats on being able to read lips. That’s actually pretty cool.)
Forcing users to watch your video with sound makes them much less likely to watch at all. Facebook is giving you a tool that makes it easier to get better results!
Ready to see how it works?
How to use Facebook’s new video captioning tool
First of all, here’s how far we’ve come.
In the past, if you wanted to add captions to a Facebook video, you had to either embed them in the video itself (so that they couldn’t be turned on/off), or you had to upload a SubRip (.srt) file. That meant manually typing out everything in exactly the right format, down to fractions of seconds.
Basically, you had to do this:
(In case you never did it – it wasn’t fun.)
Now, Facebook does the hard work for you – and you can edit your captions in real time.
If you’ve used YouTube’s caption editor, this should be pretty familiar to you – Facebook’s voice recognition software identifies what your video says and when, giving you a template you can edit right in your browser.
To access it, go to one of your videos and find the “Edit Post” option:
From there, you can access the Captions menu to either upload an .srt file (just like old times!) or use the “Generate” button.
That’ll bring up a window where you can see the captions Facebook has created for you, right alongside the video itself:
Your work isn’t done once Facebook generates captions for you, though.
Because while voice recognition software is powerful, it isn’t perfect! Facebook will give you a huge head start by loading up what it thinks your video is saying, but you should definitely go through line by line and make sure everything looks right.
Otherwise, you might end up with something like this:
Once you’re done, all you have to do is save, and boom – your video is viewer-friendly for the vast majority of users who prefer muted content to sound!
(And by the way – you can watch the video we’ve been using as an example right here! No headphones required.)
Do you have captions to add?
There you have it, videophiles – a quick, easy tool for adding captions to your Facebook videos!
The question now is, are you going to use it?
Do you think it might not be worth the trouble?
Or do you prefer sharing only videos that don’t have any speech in them at all, like this one?
Let us know what you think of this update in the comments below!
The post The New Facebook Video Feature That Might Seriously Increase Your Views appeared first on MeetEdgar Blog.