Is mute killing video’s impact?

People using phones

As you’ve no doubt noticed, video is becoming much more commonplace on social media. It’s now easier and cheaper than ever to create videos with some apps even providing the ability to add directly to timelines and news feeds.

Advertising giant ZenithOptimedia’s Online Video Forecast believes that over half of all video consumed in 2016 will be on mobile devices. Reuters also project that within the next five years up to 70% of mobile network traffic will consist of video.

Facebook themselves know the significance of this with their research showing huge uplifts in video advertising engagement against static ads. Indeed, they state video views have grown by over 50% in Q2 this year to an average of 1 billion a day!

Impressive stuff!

There is an almost inexhaustible supply of research backing up how effective video is as a medium. So, people are creating content.

They are creating it for themselves, for their friends, for their companies. It’s being used on websites, but more frequently it’s being shared through social media channels, either directly on feeds or with links to specific websites.

People are hungry for moving image content. So it comes as no surprise that this approach now features heavily in most marketing strategies.

Astonishingly though, sites like LittleThings who boast an average of 150 million monthly Facebook video views, believe that 85% of these occur with no volume.

85 percent!

So those beautifully crafted adverts with hand-picked voice over artists are only being seen and not heard?

Many consumers check their devices on their morning commute or before switching off at night, and everything in between. In these cases distinguishable audio is not always desirable and the mute button is firmly switched on.

So what's the solution?

Video play-out sites like YouTube and Vimeo all support the option of closed captions which the user can switch on and off at any time, in any language. Social Media is still yet to implement this functionality but we are seeing videos with subtitles appearing all the time.

Subtitling means that viewers are able to understand your message without the need to re-shoot. Subtitling can be added in any language so the same content can be shared the world over!

All of the above is why we’re so excited about CaptionHub. With the upturn of video we’ve developed a platform that is simple, quick, cost effective and relevant.

We can help companies deliver messages to consumers that can be read whatever they are doing and wherever they are in the world.

See CaptionHub in action