If you’ve been reading this blog for a while you’ll know that for marketing your music the following rules apply:

• Video is one of the best tools you have for marketing your music.
• Video is the most engaging media/content format on Facebook.

Everybody loves video, especially Facebook.  Facebook videos automatically start on News feeds by default and they play without sound so it’s important that your videos cut through and make an impact even when there is no volume.

Larger Facebook pages caption their videos, and you should think about doing the same.

One of the best ways to do that is by captioning or subtitling lyrics/speech contained within the video. How can you do that?  Let me show you.

In Your Video Editing Software

If you’ve created the video yourself in Final Cut,  Adobe Premiere or iMovie, you might find it easy enough to use a static ‘title’ file and overlay each line on your video timeline.  If you’re familiar with video editing packages, you should have no problem creating these titles and this might be your preferred option.

Adding words as a ‘title’ on a video editing package is a simple process.

Uploading A Text File To The Video Hosting Service

Both Facebook and Youtube allow you to upload and ‘add’ an additional SRT text ‘caption/subtitle’ file to your video which are placed on top of an existing video.   SRT files are a simple captioning or ‘subtitle’ format which comprises just basic text.  Each ‘line’ has a start and end time listed in a hours:minutes:seconds,milliseconds format.

Using a simple text editor (Text Edit or Notepad) you can create a caption for each ‘line’ of speech or line in your ong.  Here’s the format

1
00:00:20,000 –> 00:00:24,400
This is your first line of text.

2
00:00:24,600 –> 00:00:27,800
And this is your second.

Once completed, save this as an SRT file (you’ll have to add this file designation) and save the file as UFT-8 encoded (see image below).

When saving your text, don’t save as a TXT file, save as an SRT file.

YouTube

In the ‘Subtitles and CC’ editing section of every video, you can upload an SRT file.

It is possible to type and create captions on the fly in YouTube but I’d suggest creating an SRT file and uploading on YouTube like this.

Facebook

• Click your video to expand it.
• Click Edit This Video in the right column or click Options and select Edit This Video from the menu.
• Click Choose File to upload the SRT(.srt) file from your computer.
• Click Save.

Further Reading

Facebook subtitles
https://www.facebook.com/help/261764017354370

YouTube Video
Creating subtitles & Closed Captions from within YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCZ-cxfxzvk

Got any questions about this post or how you can better market yourself?

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