Video captions on Facebook are important, particularly on ads, because Facebook videos, by necessity, autoplay without sound. The lack of audio reduces an advertisers capacity to grab attention in the News Feed, and with research showing that 47% of the value in a video campaign is delivered in the first three seconds, any reduction in potential impact is significant. Even more, Facebook’s own research shows that 41% of videos are meaningless without sound, largely because content hasn’t traditionally been developed with auto-mute in mind.
Such findings are what prompted Facebook to implement auto-generated captions – and now they’re looking expand that capacity beyond ads, with all Pages to be given access to automated captions for any video they post, according to TechCrunch.
Photo credit: Sarah.Marshall via Visualhunt / CC BY
