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Hey legend,
I’m sure you’ve seen the stat that up to 80% of social media users watch their video content on mute (I’m clearly in the 20%).
And you probably understand that adding captions not only increases your content’s accessibility but also gives the algorithms another touchpoint (aka ”metadata” such as titles, descriptions etc) to identify, classify and surface your content to the right audience.
But you may think that to have professional-looking captions, you need to:
- Have an advanced video editing skill set; or
- Spend a lot of time manually entering every word; or
- Afford a freelancer on a retainer that creates content for you
All of this isn’t necessary anymore.
But you may be unsure of what’s the best approach for you, like a few legends within our CWC community:
Today, I’m going to help you identify the easiest, most affordable and most efficient approach that suits you best, with a no-BS guide for you to reference to start captioning your content.
1: You post short-form video directly to Instagram or TikTok
Both Instagram and TikTok have free and built-in auto-generated captioning features in their app – so use them!
✅ Pros
- It’s super quick (and free)
- It has an 80-95% transcription accuracy rate
- It can be done in-app, right on your smartphone
❌ Cons
- Correcting errors can be tedious on mobile
- You have a limited selection of captions styles (i.e. fonts, appearance)
- Downloading your captioned video (to post on other platforms), will be in lower quality
Here’s how to do it in:
TikTok
2) You post short-form video to multiple platforms
One of the issues I mentioned earlier, is that downloading (”saving”) a video that has been captioned within the Instagram/TikTok app is that it will come out in a lower quality (”resolution”)
So to avoid this, I recommend that you edit and export your video in a standalone video editing app.
That will preserve the resolution of your video and ensure that it’s of the best quality for every platform you’ll upload it to.
At the time of writing this, my top recommendation for the best free & beginner-friendly video editing app is CapCut, available on mobile (iOS & Android), desktop and even in a web browser.
✅ Pros
- Ability to identify and remove filler words
- More control over your caption styling and formatting
- Dynamic captions allow you to surface each word as it’s said
❌Cons
- Can be tedious making corrections on mobile
- It (probably) won’t be free forever, so anticipate a subscription in the future
- Owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, who have a questionable track record when it comes to data privacy
Here’s how you do it in CapCut:
3) You create long-form (>60 secs) video and prefer to edit captions in a text document
If reviewing and revising a long string of spoken text on a mobile screen adds a lot of friction to your workflow, and the accuracy of your transcription matters (i.e. pronouns like names), then a paid monthly subscription to Descript is the way to go.
It’s one of the most versatile all-in-one content creation tools I’ve used (see below), and its standout feature is that you edit your content as if it’s a text document.
That way, you can review your video’s transcription in a more intuitive way, with even more flexibility and choice around how your captions appear.
✅ Pros
- Tonnes of customisation available including dynamic captions and filler words
- Super intuitive to get started with their desktop app
- The free plan allows 1 hour of transcription and 1 water-mark free video export per month
❌Cons
- The free plan limits your video exports to 720p (lower resolution)
- The best features are accessible through the paid plan
- If you’re not producing a lot of long-form content, this probably won’t be worth it for you (yet!)
So in summary, if you are…
- Posting on Instagram or TikTok only? Use their in-app captioning feature
- Posting across multiple platforms? Use CapCut (or a standalone editing app)
- Editing lots of long-form video? Use Descript
Happy captioning my friend and I’ll catch you in the next one
🕺🏽Mamba