How to add captions to Facebook videos

You’re on your smart phone, scrolling through your Facebook feed. You see a video. Do you stop scrolling and press play? In most cases, you probably don’t. But let’s say you are scrolling through your Facebook feed, and you see a video with captions. Do you read them? Yes, you probably do, at least for a little while to see if the content interests you. This is why it’s so important to caption your videos on Facebook! Watch our video below (or read the transcription that follows) for a detailed How-To guide on captioning your Facebook videos!

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Below is a transcription of the video above. 

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Hi! This is Katy from Katy Dwyer Design. I am here to show you how to add captions to your Facebook videos.

 

This is a really, really useful thing to do. As you probably know even when you are scrolling through Facebook news feeds, you are not stopping and listening to the videos, and the ones that you have a tendency to get caught up in are the videos that have captions.

 

Therefore, t is really useful to add captions to your videos once you have posted them to Facebook.

 

The first thing that you need to know is that this is going to work with videos that you upload directly to Facebook, so we’re not talking about YouTube links that you’re sharing! It will also work with Facebook live. But you need to go back in and do this after your live video is posted and shared.

 

Here is what you do. Go to your business page.

 

The first thing you are going to do once you get there is go to your videos (and you can do this to any video that has already been uploaded, so why not go in there and do it to all of them?).

 

I am going to use this video that I just posted, “Content Marketing Schedules,” and you’re going to click on your video and open it up.

 

Here we are, and we’ve paused our video, and we are going to click on these three little dots down here on the right and choose edit video.

 

Once we get to this screen, we are going to go over here to subtitles and captions.

 

I want to point out that this is not going to work in Safari, so if you’re using Safari on a Mac, you do need to do this in Chrome or FireFox.

 

Once I get here, the first thing we need to do is select our language. Mine is English, so we’re going to start there.

 

Once we’ve done that, where it says captions added, we’re going to click on English: auto-generated, and again, choose English here and then once you’ve got English: auto-generated what we can do here is click on this little pencil.

 

So now what you see has happened is that Facebook has auto-generated the captions based on what it found in my video, and this is the fun part. This is where we get to go in and edit the captions so they read and look the way you want.

 

I am going to warn you, what is going to happen is that as you go through the captions, the video is going to play, you’re going to have to pause, and jump back and forth. You’ll see that happening as I go in here. Now it is going to start playing, etc. So I am going to just keep going through here and I’ll catch you when we’re done.

 

As you’re noticing, as I go through, you will see that Facebook has picked some interesting words–not exactly what I said–so I am just going in and fine tuning each of the captions that are going to show up here in this nice little gray box in the video.

 

One of the other things that you can do as you’re going through here is, if you have extra words–if you’re saying, “basically” or “um”–you don’t need to include them in the captions, so just get rid of them.

 

I have just finished editing all of my captions and now I’m going to click “save draft” and then I am going to click “save.”

 

Now if we go back to my page, and we start scrolling through, we should see now, as you can see, the video is playing and it’s playing with the captions.

 

Now when someone sees this video in their newsfeed they will get a sense of what I am talking about without having to stop and play it. They can read what I am saying and they can get that content without turning their volume up and bothering people around them.

 

Let’s be honest, a lot of people are not going to stop and turn their volume up on their computer or their phone as they are scrolling through their news feed.

 

Adding captions to your Facebook videos is a great feature. I highly recommend it, and it really helps to drive engagement on your Facebook page.

 

Good luck!