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Elise Micheals is a social media creator and an executive mentor and men’s coach, helping clients heal subconscious trauma to improve their relationships, business, and broader lives.
We sat down with Elise to dive into her experience with Captions — from cutting down on upload times to supercharging user engagement. We cover:
- Why skipping captioning altogether prevents inclusive content
- How TikTok engagement can translate to more client sales
- The value of your videos’ aesthetics for your branding
“I love this app because it picks up dialogue so well, I hardly have to fix any of it. Depending on the video, editing with Captions is a five-minute process.”
How Captioning Captures User Interest & Attention
Elise has been publishing content across LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram for about two and a half years now. Early on, she wouldn’t caption her videos at all — but not for lack of caring.
It simply took too much time to transcribe all of her speech and edit it to line up with the footage, especially considering how she tries to film, edit, and schedule multiple videos at once.
A number of viewers complained: If they were hearing-impaired or just couldn’t turn their volume up in public, they couldn’t access anything she was saying.
“Users would tell me they’d save the video to watch later,” Elise explains, “but I’m doubtful they would remember or be willing to come back to it. I accidentally neglected that audience.”
She could tell she was losing interest and engagement.
Her content overall was making less of an impact because her fundamental ability to reach and include as many people as possible was being stunted. Eventually, she discovered and tried out some other automated captioning apps (i.e. MixCaptions) as a potential fix, but results were lackluster.
Much like with TikTok’s automatic captioning feature, she’d often have to go in afterward to fix the inaccurate text by hand anyways.
“I would skip captioning my videos altogether because it takes so much time when you don’t have a robot to type the words for you. I just couldn’t do it.”
Onboarding with Captions: Streamlined Editing & Drafting
Elise’s video creation workflow usually involves batch filming a bunch of shorter videos, doing basic editing with InShot, and then uploading those semi-final cuts to Captions.
She highlights how “super fast” the process has become, since Captions both quickly and accurately transcribes every bit of speech in her footage.
Compared to previous apps, she rarely has to dive back in to tweak the results for accuracy.
Even more, Captions cuts down on other aspects of the editing process, since it automatically:
- Takes your file and trims out any awkward silences, pauses or ums in your speech, and other dead footage. No more dicing and splicing on your part!
- Transcribes and displays your captions so the dialogue appears and disappears in line with whatever you’re saying. No more scrubbing around and tracking timestamps!
All in all, Captions has cut down Elise’s captioning process to about five minutes per video. That difference is crucial to ensure she can prep batches of content (usually five videos from each filming session) with less time and effort and have them ready to post on a daily basis.
Beyond that step, Captions also allows her to save her captioned videos as drafts or upload them as native files across every platform at once.
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Captions Benefit #1: Increased Follower Engagement
Since switching to Captions, Elise has seen significant growth in engagement on her videos.
As a business owner who regularly posts content about her area of work, that engagement is crucial for top-line growth and funneling viewers (AKA potential clients) toward her work.
She explains: If people don’t find your content engaging or easy to digest, they won’t follow you.
If they do, they can actually absorb and process the content and come to know and trust you.
“You’re actually making an impact on them. That’s the importance of having captions and subtitles for easy viewing.” Of course, more people following and loving your content become more people who are willing to follow you down the sales funnel — to actually becoming clients or buyers.
Let’s say you run an online store. You’ll want to make the site browsing experience as easy as possible for people who might want to purchase.
The exact same goes for content: Make your videos as easy to watch as possible for people who want to be entertained or learn something new.
“My engagement has absolutely increased since I’ve started captioning my videos — and even more so since I switched to Captions.”
Captions Benefit #2: Improved Aesthetics & Branding
At this point, Elise is a long-time user of Captions — and her favorite update so far has been the wider and wider range of customization options for text styles, colors, typefaces, and more.
She loves the way the Captions team is dedicated to continuously improving the app, but, even more, she loves that she can actually edit videos to her true style.
After all, common options (like TikTok’s automatic captioning) either have:
- Far fewer font and color options than Captions
- Zero customizability options, which is why almost every TikTok displays the same gray-and-white, small-text captions
A visually appealing video (from your lighting setup and camera quality to the placement of your captions) is all the more likely to attract and impress viewers.
The aesthetics also matter because, in Elise’s words, they become part of the brand and look of your content. They’re what people remember you by and expect from you in future content.
Having as many vibrant customizability options as possible becomes essential if you want to make your content identity true to your unique style.
“The aesthetics of your captions are part of your brand, your look. They’re part of how people remember you and stay engaged with your videos.”
