Adding Captions To A LinkedIn Video
So many people watch video with their phones on mute. Which is why it’s important to add subtitles to your video when you upload them to LinkedIn. Here we will go through how you can get subtitles (also know as captions) on your LinkedIn videos.
Firstly lets look at the key component to subtitles, the srt file.
SRT File
The .srt file is a text document that contains key information the video players and websites can use to display the spoken word as text.
Along with the spoken text, the file contains time information so the system knows when to start displaying that line of text and when to remove it from view.
It’s this information that LinkedIn needs to know what spoken word is within the video. So before we do anything else, we need an srt file.
PAID SRT FILE OPTIONS
There are a few companies out there where you can pay and they will generate an srt file for you. They charge you on the length of the video and some charge a lot more than others. The cheapest is Rev.com which charge $1 per minute of video, which is ridiculous! I don’t know how they get it so cheap.
And don’t let the price fool you, they are top quality, very accurate and used by thousands of companies including me. You can upload videos directly to them or send them a link to a video already online. You can send them youtube links and even public dropbox links.
But if you are on a budget, or have only a small amount of dialogue you can do it yourself for free.
Free srt File Options
There are apps out there that allow you to write an srt from scratch, but that seems like a lot of work when youtube will do a half-decent it for free.
Upload your video to YouTube and they will use AI to guess what the spoken word is. They do a pretty good job but you will need to edit the captions on YouTube for accuracy before downloading the srt file to your computer.
Personally I think this is a lot of work and normally a 2 minute video will take me about 30 min to check and edit the captions the way I like it. So by doing it myself I save 2 USD but it costs me half an hour of my time. I don’t know about you but I value my time much greater than 4 USD an hour so I normally use rev.com
Oh, I should probably mention here that Facebook has the AI technology to generate automatic captions. These can be edited within Facebook but only if the video is uploaded to your business page. Crucially Facebook does NOT allow you to download srt files, so it’s a waste of time.
OPEN CAPTIONS OR CLOSED CAPTIONS
There are two main ways of adding captions to your videos and the result and platform you use will depend on which one to use.
Open Captions
Open captions are burned into the video file meaning the user cannot turn them on or off. The advantage to you is that you get more control on the font size and location and you guarantee that the viewer will be able to see them but they can be distracting.
Open captions can work well on LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram if you don’t want to mess around with uploading srt files. You will still need the srt file and an application such as handbrake to burn in the captions.
By the way, Youtube is typically watched with the sound on so having burned in captions here can be particularly annoying so I wouldn’t recommend burning in captions to YouTube videos
Closed Captions
Closed captions can be turned on or off just like turning on the subtitles on the TV. LinkedIn will read the srt file and display the captions for the user which they have more control over. They can turn it off if they find it easier to read that way. By default Closed Captions are on
Uploading an srt file to LinkedIn
Uploading captions to an LinkedIn video is really easy to do but, and this is a flaw in LinkedIn, you can only do it at the time you upload your video to LinkedIn
You only get one chance at this unless you want to delete the video and re-upload it.
You cannot upload an srt caption file to videos that are already on LinkedIn.
1. Create a new post
This wont work from your mobile so head over to your computer create a new post on LinkedIn
2. select a video file
Click on the movie camera icon (next to the plus) to select and upload the video file
3. Attach the caption file to upload with your LinkedIn video
Click the little pencil icon to ‘edit’ the video. There is only one option in the edit menu and that is to select and upload captions to your LinkedIn video.
4. Upload captions for your LinkedIn video
In the video settings there is only one option. Press select file to choose and upload the file. Press save and return to your post to complete writing before posting
Test it out and get it out there
Let us know in the comments below how you got on!