Whether you publish content on social media for marketing or just for the pure fun of it, you must admit that creating video content is one of the best ways to get more eyes on your page or business. However, it takes more than just hyper-stylized transitions and fancy editing to get audiences watching till the end. This is where video transcription for social media comes in. It works by boosting your SEO, providing accessibility, and improving overall engagement.
In this article, you’ll learn that:
- Transcribing social media content opens up access to millions with hearing disabilities, making your content more inclusive and widely reachable.
- Transcriptions improve content discoverability and engagement by providing text for search engines to index and captions for viewers, leading to higher watch times and interaction.
- Professional transcription can protect against content theft and ensure high accuracy and compliance with accessibility laws, making it an essential tool for effective social media presence.
Social Media Sites That Support Video Content
Before we jump into specifics, let’s discuss which social media sites offer the best bang for your buck regarding video content.
| Platform | Year Established | Description | Users As Of 2024 |
| YouTube | 2005 | Video sharing | 2.7 billion |
| TikTok | 2016 | Short-form videos | 2 billion |
| 2010 | Photos & videos | 1.4 billion | |
| 2004 | Social networking | 3.07 billion | |
| 2006 | Microblogging | 336 million | |
| Snapchat | 2011 | Short-term content | 513 million |
| 2003 | Professional networking | 1 billion | |
| Twitch | 2011 | Live streaming | 140 million |
| 2010 | Idea sharing | 544.29 million | |
| Vimeo | 2004 | Video hosting | 260 million |
Note: Many video-sharing platforms now implement social media functionalities like groups in the form of channels, discussion forums, unique profiles, direct messaging, and other social networking aspects.
What Does Transcribing Social Media Content Mean?
Transcribing social media content means converting audio and video files into text. Further, the resulting file can be provided alongside the content as a digital transcript or encoded as captions or subtitles in the video.
On YouTube, for instance, you can turn on captions by clicking on the CC icon in the bottom-right portion of the video player. If the video you’re watching does not have a standalone caption file uploaded, YouTube will provide real-time automatic captions.
If you prefer transcripts alongside the content, you can click on …more on the description below the video, scroll down and click Show Transcript.
Benefits Of Transcribing Social Media Content
Transcribing video content has a few benefits for interested content creators. Here are the most important ones:
Accessibility
According to the World Health Organization, about 5% of the current population suffers from hearing disabilities that are severe enough to require medical intervention. That’s a little over 430 million people worldwide, which is expected to rise to 700 million by 2050. That’s just for people who need rehabilitation; if we consider partial or moderate hearing loss, that number will balloon to 2.5 billion by 2050.
While social media creators have little power to stop this inevitable tide, they can offer more equitable solutions for their platforms. One of the most prominent advantages of social media transcription is providing accessibility options to people with hearing disabilities. As a result, video transcription can increase your potential reach while being more inclusive.
Search Engine Optimization
It is a well-known fact that Google Search, the number one search engine in the world, cannot crawl audio and video content. That means YouTube videos, Facebook Live posts, Instagram Reels And Stories, and TikTok videos must depend entirely on metadata content and if the host page is indexed. That leaves a lot of SEO potential out of the equation.
Thankfully, social media transcription can cover that inherent weakness. By offering custom transcripts, you provide Google with a keyword-rich textual representation of your video or audio content. Creators can also use automatic transcription and speech recognition technology to generate these transcripts. However, there are more effective and accurate ways to transcribe audio; we’ll discuss that separately.
Improved Engagement
“Engagement” is a common, often throwaway term whose original definition has been lost to time. As a reminder, engagement is defined as a measure of connection between content and the user in any form the platform allows. It has since been used as an essential social media and video site metric, which is used further for recommendation systems and other similar algorithms. Increased engagement is often critical in making a video successful on different sites.
On YouTube, for example, engagement is measured via likes, dislikes, comments, and subscription numbers. It often goes hand in hand with watch time—these two are an important part of the site’s search and discovery metric.
Now, why am I talking about engagement in an article about transcription? I’m glad you asked. In 2019, a joint study by Verizon Media and Publicis Media found that 80% of viewers are likelier to watch an entire video if it includes captions.
Another survey from Digiday states that 75% of people watch online videos on mute on social media platforms like Facebook. This is unsurprising, as I often do that, too, especially when I’m in a crowded place and don’t have my headphones handy. In those instances, any social media video I come across that doesn’t have captions is an automatic pass.
If you don’t want that to happen to your content, then I suggest getting professional transcription and captioning services.
Legal Compliance
The ADA, or The Americans with Disabilities Act, is one of the most prominent, if not the most prominent, civil rights laws that protect people with disabilities from discrimination. As such, the ADA covers hearing disabilities, and they have captioning guidelines to ensure that businesses producing or offering online video content are more inclusive.
The subject might require finer distinction regarding coverage, but according to the Bureau of Internet Accessibility, captions must have three essential aspects to follow legal requirements completely: they must be accurate, complete, and synchronized.
Getting the help of human transcription services can help you hit all three requirements. For example, Ditto Transcripts offers manual transcription and video captioning services with 99% accuracy rates that far outstrip automated transcription and speech-to-text programs. All captions are synchronized properly, and timestamps can be added upon request.
A Deterrent For Plagiarism
This entire section might look like it came out of left field, but hear me out as I attempt to amuse you with a story.
In April 2018, a sizable anime and gaming YouTube Channel called Mother’s Basement published a video with hard-coded Portuguese subtitles. This was weird, considering Geoff Thew, the person behind Mother’s Basement, was a) Canadian, b) spoke almost exclusively in English, and c) catered almost exclusively to native English speakers.
In his video, Thew outlined how Brazilian YouTuber PenseGeek had allegedly been publishing videos that were simply Portuguese translations of Thew’s videos. He also found that PenseGeek had been doing this to several other YouTubers, and the plagiarism was so bad that the dozens of stolen video content were almost word-for-word translations.
In another recent viral video that extensively covers plagiarism, Harry Brewis, better known as hbomberguy, said, “This [situation] sucks, but it also points to one of the core barriers to accessibility for creators. Most videos are trapped in their mother tongue, making them hard to watch in other languages—and therefore, easier to steal.”
This incident led Brewis to pay for professional translation and captions for a particular video that was doing well in certain countries.
Taking a cue from his response, social media video creators can enlist the help of professional translation and transcription services to protect their audio or video posts by offering them to different countries with different languages in their original form. This gives would-be translation plagiarists less incentive to steal your content.
What Are Your Transcription Options For Social Media Videos?
Several transcription methods for audio or video files might sound like excellent ways to make your content more accessible and engaging. However, not all of them are appropriate for social media transcription. Here’s why:
In-House Transcription
In-house transcription refers to either you or a hired employee transcribing video to text. This has certain significant disadvantages, the biggest of which is that transcription is time-consuming. Furthermore, having a professional employee transcribe audio to text can be expensive.
Automatic Transcription
Automatic transcription uses machine learning, AI transcription software, or other automated speech-to-text tools to automatically transcribe and caption video or audio recordings. Most platforms like Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok offer built-in auto-generated closed captions. They also often come as free transcription functions in popular word processors like Google Docs and Microsoft Word.
While this might sound like a fast, cheap option, transcribing Instagram videos with AI will lead to less accuracy—14% less, to be exact, as automatic verbatim transcription is often only 86% accurate.
Manual Transcription Is The Best Way To Transcribe Social Media Videos
Transcribing social media videos is better handled by professionals, and Ditto Transcripts is your best option. We’ll take any video or audio file and produce transcripts and captions that are 99% accurate all the time, made by 100% human transcriptionists. This ensures that inaccuracies do not affect your overall marketing and engagement strategies.
We offer manual video transcriptions and captioning of YouTube and Facebook videos, Instagram stories, TikToks, and other social media posts. We handle a wide range of spoken content in different industries and offer translation services with the same 99% guarantee.
For Professional Transcription Services, Go For Ditto Transcripts
Social media marketing is a delicate process, and you don’t want to mess up your campaigns with inaccurate text files that need more time to fix. Get Ditto’s video and audio transcription service and experience 100% U.S.-based human services, more than 99% accuracy rates, fast turnaround times, and excellent customer service.
Our online transcription software also comes at affordable rates, and we can handle different types of video formats. So, what are you waiting for? Call us for a free trial.
Ditto Transcripts is a HIPAA and CJIS-compliant Denver, Colorado-based transcription services company that provides fast, accurate, and affordable transcripts for individuals and companies of all sizes. Call (720) 287-3710 today for a free quote, and ask about our free five-day trial.
