If you are using a Facebook business page for your communications, you will probably be aware that posting video and live video can help you reach more of your Facebook audience even without paying for advertising.
One of the things to be aware of is that on Facebook, most people watch video content without audio turned on and therefore captioning your video content is important to engage your audience.
I have written about captioning videos several times including tools you can use and in November I wrote about the new feature from Facebook that enables you to automatically create captions for your Facebook videos and Facebook live video replays.
Over the months I have noticed that Facebook is encouraging people to use their automatic captioning tool when posts are uploaded to Facebook – see as an example the screen shot below which I took at the time of uploading a video on a Facebook business page.
But today I noticed another new feature – the ability to customise your Facebook video and live video replay captions. To access this feature you can click the cog on the video on the Facebook page you have the admin rights for. See the screen shot below on desktop.
Then you will see the option to edit your captions. This seems to just be rolling out so you may not have this feature yet on your Page.
You have the option to change the background colour of the caption, the text colour, the opacity and the size of the captions. This means that you can customise it to not only be as close as possible to your visual brand identity, but also make the captions stand out against the video which will encourage people to read and hopefully engage with your content.
You will be able to preview your caption changes before you publish them.
You can see examples in these screen shots of the changes I made to test which I felt was the most relevant to our Facebook Live replay.
In the video below I share how the feature works – alternatively watch the Facebook video caption editing on YouTube.
I hope you find this of assistance for optimising your Facebook videos and Facebook Live replays.
Remember to check out this previous article for more information about Facebook auto captions and at the bottom of the article you will find a number of other resources for captioning videos.
And if you need assistance with your Facebook video and live video plan to support your strategic goals you can schedule a meeting with me here.
And f you are not yet ready to implement this tip, remember you can save this article to your Pinterest boards and come back to it later – just pin the image below.
