Why you should use captions, not subtitles for your videos
Don‘t get me wrong - subtitles are a great way to keep the audience on social media engaged. It helps, when the sound is off and it provides an extra element to look at. We are trained to look at text, so its a great way to increase the view time and engagement.
But there ist another text that is always getting ignored - the on screen captions. This text is not temporary, its permanent. This text provides the user an anchor to hang on to, emptionally, intellectually. It provides the viewer with more informations, either directly related to the visual content or something completely different.
As a content creator i discovered this kind of permanent text and thought about sharing it with you. I came up with several ideal of how to structure this text in a way its actually getting usefull.
I looked on tiktok and scraped over 1000 videos randomly from a new discover page. I bulk downloaded them and extracted the on screen text videos. Those videos without captiond or just subtitles were filtered out.
I categorized all the captions i extracted into different categories. I discovered 10 categories were every caption ON EARTH fits into. These are like: Reaction (LOOK AT THAT!!), Question (Did you see that neon light??) and several more. You get the point
I tried to find a fit for every video. Every video has its own visual elements. Connect these two - visual elements and categorized captions - to get the best result.
Actually to my suprising it worked. I tested the captions that i generated with different videos. As you believe it or not, 1 got over 10 Million Views. I will share a link, so you can watch yourself.
I talked about it to alot people and actually most of them are not aware yet. Lets spread the words!