Subtitles are a great addition to YouTube for several reasons. Find out how to add them to your videos and reach more people here!

Benefits of Subtitles

Adding closed captions to YouTube videos makes them more accessible in a number of ways. Firstly, viewers who speak another language can use them to understand the video’s dialogue. Google Translate automatically delivers the captions in the viewer’s selected language. Of course, as anyone who has previously used Google Translate will affirm, the translation won’t be without hilarious mix-ups, but it’s a start.

Secondly, subtitles allow your deaf and hearing impaired audience to follow what’s going on in your videos. But thirdly, a vast majority of people actually watch videos with the sound muted. Whether commuting to work having forgotten headphones, or perusing YouTube whilst listening to something else, many people opt for the visual only. By adding closed captions, you’re enabling a massive chunk of your viewership to get everything out of your video in the way they prefer to watch.

Even more than this, subtitles actually help boost your videos rankings on YouTube. The metadata in closed captions shows up in search results, which means potentially reaching a wider audience. This means they’re a fantastic tool for increasing views, potentially gaining subscribers, and thus earning money from your videos.

How to Add Subtitles

There are a few ways to add subtitles to your videos. You can either opt for the auto-generated ones using YouTube’s speech recognition software, type them manually, or upload a file.

To add auto-sync subtitles to your video, head to the creator studio and hit Subtitles from the left-hand sidebar. Select the video you’d like to captions to and choose the default language you would like them to display as. You can find this by clicking the downward arrow in the Languages column. Once you’ve selected your language, click Confirm, and you’re all set.

For typing manually, click the link of your chosen video within the subtitles section and select your language. Then hit Add, and from here you can select the manual option. The video will play as you do this, but you can pause whist you type and the timing of the captions will be set automatically. Don’t forget to add captions such as [applause] or [thunder], so your viewers know what’s happening in the video. You can also add manually typed captions in multiple languages on one video if you so wish.

If you’d prefer to upload a file for your subtitles, this is a really simple process. Just select Upload, and choose whether you would like upload with or without timing, then select the file. Finally, all you need to do is Save. Find out which file formats YouTube accepts when it comes to uploading your own.

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