Having slick and accurate captions on your social media videos can greatly improve engagement and viewership. There are several reasons why every viral video with spoken words that you see on social media has snazzy captions. Let's go over them.

Accessibility

Accessibility is one of the primary reasons for adding subtitles to your videos. The reality is we don't all sit on the couch consuming content with the sound turned on. Research shows that a majority of content gets consumed when we are out and about, with our phones on silent mode. Not having captions will instantly alienate anybody who has their sound turned off. Having subtitles on only has upside as it makes content accessible for a massive group of muted content consumers and they enhance engagement even for those who view with sound on.

Engagement and retention

As people flick through TikToks or Instagram Reels fast, engaging captions can be a thumb-stopper, hooking people in the first 3 seconds of your video. Over the past few years the way captions are presented has evolved, with fun designs and animations to immediately grab attention and pull people into your story.

Branding and style

Subtitles are an opportunity to show off your brand's style. Customize your captions to follow your brand guidelines like font and color and create something that's instantly recognizable to your audience. In fact, many brands have their caption style set out in their brand guidelines. You can push it further than just font and color and include the way they animate and enter the frame.

Add beautiful captions to your videos

Create your next viral video in elevate.io — the online video editor that makes adding subtitles to your videos simpler than ever. With just a few clicks, you can create a transcript for your entire video, enable captions, and choose an engaging style template. Customize a template and make the style your own by adjusting font, size, color, background, word count and much more.