Social Media Marketing Tip of the Day - 10/19/20

Video captions: they’re not just for following that Netflix show while you’re munching on crunchy snacks. These days the idea of making your content “mobile-friendly” is top-of-mind for many of us in the content-generation business, but are you also thinking about making it as “people-friendly” as you can? Remember ABC– Always Be Captioning. Why? According to the National Association for the Deaf, there are somewhere around 36 million Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing — that’s a lot of people who you may not be reaching with your multimedia content if you miss out on captioning. That’s not to mention non-native speakers; Captions can help those viewing who might not otherwise catch 100% of what you’re trying to convey. Then you have the rest of your audience (like me) who just keep their volume turned down or muted. I’ll admit: unless a video captures my interest right away, I’m probably not going to bother turning the sound up on my phone. Captions can help portray your point, even when people aren’t actually listening. Most importantly, captions help with SEO. You’ll be glad to know that user-created captions — on YouTube in particular — are indexed by search engines as they crawl for content. Are you captioning your videos on social media yet?