There are almost 3 billion users on social media. In a Facebook study, it was said that up to 85 percent of people watch social media videos with the sound off. So in this blog post we'll be showing you how to create subtitles for TikTok to make sure you are reaching those silent watchers.
Now imagine if you could reach every single person on social media but 85 percent watch your videos with the sound off. If they don’t understand one of your videos due to the fact they can’t hear what you’re saying they will happily skip past it without thinking twice. However if you had subtitles people would be a lot less likely to skip them. If you don’t have subtitles you're theoretically missing out on an audience of 2,55 billion.
So basically long story short, not having subtitles on your video content is one of the worst moves you can make as a social media marketer in 2020
Now let’s scale this theory down, obviously there’s no way you’ll be reaching every single person across all social media platforms.
We're going focus on one platform, and we’re going to choose the UK’s current top app, TikTok. TikTok has been growing at an incredible rate, as of january 2020 it has amassed 400 million daily active users. So even if a small percentage of the 400 million daily users were consuming the video-only content platform without sound, you would still be missing out on a lot of potential viewers, followers and customers.
And I’m not saying that all video content needs subtitles. But if you’re talking or explaining something in a video, subtitles on that video will help you reach thousands, if not millions more people. If you know even a little about the TikTok algorithm you should know that getting more people to watch through your videos can only be good for you.
How to create subtitles for your TikTok content?
Well there are a couple of ways and I’m going to show you both.
First of all, you can manually create all the subtitles yourself using TikTok’s text editor straight from within the app. You have different style options for the text with a choice between five fonts; Classic, Typewriter, Handwriting, Neon and Serif. The alignment of the text; Left, Center and Right. As well as dragging it to the position you want and pinching it to the size you like. Then there’s also color, for the actual text or the text labels.
Although this is an easy method due to the fact you can do it all straight from within the app and it gives you reasonably enough options for creative freedom, it’s extremely time consuming due to the fact that you have to type out all the text yourself. Also I would have to say that the biggest negative to adding subtitles straight from within TikTok is that you have to manually set the duration for each sentence you write out. And doing that all with my big thumbs on a small screen is a bit of a nightmare.
Now here’s the second method.
- Upload your video to VEED.IO
Record and edit your TikTok just as you would normally and leave the captioning until last. Once you’ve done everything, head over to veed.io and upload your video.
2. Add subtitles to your TikTok
Here you can easily subtitle your TikToks. The reason I say easily is due to the fact that once you’ve uploaded your video to VEED, all you have to do is click on Auto-Subtitles and it will automatically transcribe everything you say to text and place it at the correct times throughout your TikTok. So basically, TikTok subtitles.
3. Customise your subtitles
Thanks to Veed, just like on TikTok, you can actually customise these subtitles such as the font, colour and placement. However with Veed you have quite a bit more freedom when it comes to the customisation of your subtitles. And the best thing is, you don’t have to do it sentence by sentence.
4. Translate your subtitles (optional)
Now Veed is brilliant for easily adding subtitles to your TikToks, you can even automatically translate your subtitles. But do make sure you read back through your subtitles for correct spellings just in case.
5. Download your TikTok
Once you placed and customised your subtitles. You can hit download, Veed will then render the video with your baked-in subtitles. You can then take this video and upload it to TikTok with subtitles.
And that is how you can easily add subtitles to your TikTok videos.
We hope that now you'll be creating TikToks with subtitles left and right. If you have any questions or need any help don't hesitate to reach out.
