Speaker 1: So you've been hard at work leveling up your video game and now you're ready to add something to the next level. Please think about adding captions. We'll talk today about why adding captions is so important when it comes to your social media marketing. I'm Shannon with Shannon Lee Strategy. I'm a digital marketing coach and consultant who teaches small business owners to become confident with their marketing so they get some time back. I use simple digital marketing strategies that give small business owners fast results and offer one-on-one coaching and group coaching to meet all needs, timelines, and budgets. So you've been consistently working on your video game. I've seen you. I see you out there working on it. Are you ready to stand out, stay top of mind? You're ready to be more relatable, but you're wondering why you need to add captions to the videos you created. And it's fairly simple and I'm going to tell you why. So here are some four reasons to add captions to your video. It is important for accessibility because it allows those who have a hard time hearing to not only be able to watch your videos, but to understand them. And it's worth the extra effort to increase the traffic to that audience. If somebody is watching the videos but speaks another language or another native tongue, captions are essential as well. Last spring, someone had suggested that I start to add captions to my Instagram stories as they watch with the sound off. And this was kind of mind-boggling to me, like, who watches with the sound off? And then I did a poll and found out a lot of people do. So adding captions offer those who are in the public or choose to have the sound off the opportunity to watch and not disturb people around them. Captions allow these users to read and receive your message. And sometimes it's said that when we hear and we see the words, it retains better too. So I don't know the name of the study, but there's one that says that. Most social media platforms and applications open up with the audio automatically muted. So you'll want to make sure captions are here so they can read until they choose to unmute your content and give a listen. And adding captions to your video is a lot easier than it seems. So most social platforms, it's just as easy as hitting a toggle switch. Facebook, IGTV, YouTube all have the caption capabilities. Instagram Stories, you might have to update your app to get this, has captions under a little story sticker. It's the little guy, the little square guy with the smiley face and the dog ear. So you go in there and you hit captions and it will caption your Instagram Stories within the app. I've been waiting for this. If you're looking to brand your captions, and I see a lot of people wanting to do this and would rather do this because they want it to say on brand, Wave Video has this feature and there's apps on your phone that you can download called Subtitles or Mixed Captions and they will allow you to do captions. So action step, make your videos more accessible to others by adding captions. If you are looking for video ideas for Instagram Stories or anything else, head over to my website and download 28 days of video prompts that you can use in your stories and everywhere else. If you have a question about this video or anything marketing related, drop a comment. Tell me you've watched this in the replay and I will get it answered as soon as possible. And if you love these tips, you can join my Facebook community, The Simplified Squad. I offer free training, live coaching, expert panels, and more. See you soon.