Closed Captioning in Youtube

Steve Dotto here. Thanks for spending time with me today. Our topic today is kind of a more of a professional tip in YouTube. If you are a publisher in YouTube, you have a series of different tools that you can use within YouTube to help enhance your video after you’ve uploaded them. It’s part of being a YouTube partner and you should be using all of these tools to maximize the value of your video after you upload ot. So what I’m going to talk to you about today is closed captioning. You know when we did our TV show for years, we closed captioned each and every episode of out TV show. Believe it or not it used to cost us about $2,100 dollars all in to get each one closed captioned. Well, it’s a lot less expensive these days to do closed captioning in YouTube and it is a worthwhile endeavor. So let’s take a look at how it happens. So it starts where obviously after you uploaded your video to YouTube. Within the video manager, you can choose whichever video you want and you can edit it. Now you can see here that in my roster of different videos, most of mine have the little CC, meaning that I’ve already closed captioned those videos. I don’t closed caption every single video. I do if I’m doing a small training video for a vertical market I might not bother closed captioning it but all of my public videos like this one here, I make sure that I closed caption. So I’m going into this one that we just did for LastPass. I’m going to go in and edit that. When I click on edit, I’m brought into YouTube’s editing console and this is the place that I go to do things like annotations which you should be doing to all of your videos. It’s where I upload my custom cover art for each and every video that I have and we set things like privacy settings and monetization all in this panel. But we’re going to take a look at closed captioning right now. Before we do closed captioning, I should tell you that YouTube will caption, will create automatic closed captioning just with their own software that is basically listening to what you’re saying and then they convert it into text and it’s fairly accurate, not 100% accurate but it’s fairly accurate so you can actually use closed captioning even without doing what I’m doing here. But the reason that is I think is important to do what we are doing here, which is uploading a proper transcript to be captioned is we get extra search juice out of it, A, and B, we have incredible accuracy and make sure that all the things that we say are indeed represented on the screen. But we get that extra search juice because Google and YouTube have then a full proper transcript to apply search criteria against to make sure that the people who should be finding your video are finding your video, which is the reason that we publish them in YouTube in the first place, is it not? So the process couldn’t be simpler. We go into the Captions area here in the editing console and we click Add Captions. Then we can actually transcribe it on the fly if you’re good at that or you can upload a file. Now what I do is I actually have a transcriptionist who watches my YouTube channel and she emails me a Microsoft Word document with the transcript of all of my videos after they’re published. So within a few days of me publishing a video, I get in my Dropbox folder a Microsoft Word document in this particular case. You can’t upload a word document. You have to save the Word document as a text file. So once you saved it as a text file—we convert here to text—save the document, and then we can upload that document into YouTube. So I saved that document now. I go click on Upload a file here. I navigate my way through to wherever that file happens to be, which is right, LastPass Security text. Make sure you choose the correct one. Choose that file and it automatically uploads it and syncs it automatically. It takes a few seconds for it to be active but if we go back now to our video manager, we’ll see that we now have the closed captioning icon attached to LastPass as well. So we’ve managed to now embed a proper closed captioning track into that video. If you want to see how it looks, well I’m going back to an older one because I’m not positive if that one is 100% ready yet but let’s go to the Reasons You Need Hootsuite because of course everybody needs Hootsuite. And we start the video playing, actually an ad will probably play first. You should always let your ads play completely through because they’re full of very valuable content. Trust me on that. But in this case, we’ll skip the ad, we’ll let the video play and now we see that I’ve got my closed captioning turned on and now it is playing through properly with full closed captions so people who want to listen to, want to watch my video in a quiet environment, let’s say at work and they don’t want to bother the people around them, they can do that as well. I benefit from all of that extra search engine optimization by having a captions track embedded in the video as well. I hope you found this video to be very useful. If you have, please give us a like and don’t forget you can subscribe to our channel so you don’t have to come looking for us and instead we come to you each and every week as we produce new how-to videos. I’m Steve Dotto. Thanks for spending time with me today. [END OF VIDEO Closed Captioning in YouTube 4:57]