You’ve decided to add videos to your practice’s Facebook page. You’re going to give people a tour of your offices. You’re going to have different employees describe and show what they do. You plan on showing off new equipment. You may even have happy patients talk about their procedures.
It’s going to be pretty cool…but not if your videos depend on audio for the viewer to understand what’s going on. You may not know this, but 85 percent of all video on Facebook is watched on mute. So, if your aesthetician is describing details about a new piece of equipment, unless your viewers are professional lip readers they’re probably not going to get much out of your video.
But Facebook wants your viewers clued in, so they recently debuted a new tool that automatically generates captions for your videos. And you can easily edit those captions while inside Facebook.
Why do I need captions?
It’s one of those things you don’t think about. But when you see a video on Facebook it plays without sound. This is the default setting. Sure, you can un-mute it, but most people don’t. The 85 percent number above does seem high, but whatever the reason people don’t pump up the volume on Facebook videos.
OK, so you’ve shot your video of your new piece of equipment and your aesthetician demonstrating facets of the device. How’s this going to come across on mute? Not so well. You need captions.
Sure, certain videos such as your cat jumping into the bathtub and the like are fine, maybe even better, without sound. But for your practice videos, that’s probably not the case. And if your Facebook visitors have to watch someone talking and they have no idea what the person is saying, the odds are they’re going to tune out very quickly.
Captions to the rescue
You have been able to add subtitles/captions to videos on Facebook before, but you had to be pretty tech savvy. You needed to embed them in the video itself because then they couldn’t be turned on/off, or you had to upload a file where you edited them in by the second. It was pretty complicated for the average person.
But now Facebook, ever-helpful (and ever wanting you to spend every possible minute of every day on it), has added a tool that will generate captions for you. This new tool uses voice recognition software to identify what is being said in your video and it generates the captions to accompany it at the exact time. You can also edit those captions from within Facebook.
You’ll need to edit them
So, once you’ve hit the “Generate” button and your video is now subtitled you’re done, right? Uh, no. You know how Siri, Google, and Alexa sometimes have a devil of a time figuring out what you’ve said? The same holds true for the new Facebook voice recognition software. It will make a caption of what it thinks your video is saying, but it is far from perfect. You will need to go through the generated captions line by line to make sure what the caption is saying is actually what your speaker on the video is saying.
To do so, put a video up on your practice’s Facebook page. Then click on the three dots on the upper right corner or the screen for the drop-down menu. In that menu select “Edit Post.” From there, go to the “Captions” menu where you’ll find the old, difficult file to upload so that you can create captions on your own or the “Generate” button. Guess which you should use? Once your video is captioned, you’ll find a “Review Captions” option where you can edit them to overcome the foibles of voice recognition software.
Don’t be lazy, add captions
Now it’s up to you. People do watch video on Facebook. The question is whether you’re going to give them some. Think of the cool stuff in your practice — from people to procedures to funny stuff — that would be great on video. Then pull out your phone and shoot some footage, edit it down, and post it. But make it easy on your viewers and give them captions for their viewing pleasure. Voila, more engagement with your patients on Facebook!
Do you have other questions about how your practice can better use Facebook? Ask your MyAdvice representative, and he or she will be a fountain of possibilities.
