Telling your brand’s story on Facebook and gaining visibility for it is more important now than ever. Research shows that people consume content on Facebook mobile faster than desktop, most often within the first 3 seconds. 

Studies have also shown that a staggering 85% of people watch Facebook videos without sound.

A Facebook study also found that captions increase viewing time on video ads by an average of 12%.

That’s why running highly effective Facebook video ads and ensuring they show up in your audience’s news feed is a crucial tool for success. But, what’s the best way to have a successful Facebook ad campaign? The most important element of that is visibility.

You can utilize photo and video content to run a variety of effective ads. However, when you invest in publishing them, you want to ensure your target audience can view them at anytime. Although Facebook’s default setting is to autoplay videos in people’s newsfeeds, they can elect to have the sound feature turned off. That is why it’s essential to include captions with your video advertisement. Captioning your video ad increases its visibility across the platform because anyone can watch your ad without sound. 

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Methods acceptable for creating Facebook ads

You can create Facebook video ads in the following ways:

1. Slideshow

Facebook allows you to build an engaging video story using photos and text. You can use images you own or source stock images.

2. Stories

Facebook’s Ads Manager offers templates so you can turn your existing videos into story ads.

3. Boosting a post

Create a video post for your business page, and boost it. This turns the post into an ad that will help you reach a much larger audience.

How to get a SubRip (.srt) caption file for your Facebook ads

You can create and upload your own captions to your Facebook video. But, to do this you’ll need to generate and upload a SubRip file with the captions. That takes valuable time and know-how. Especially since Facebook is specific about the naming conventions of the .srt file. For every .srt file you upload, the file name should follow this format: filename.[two-letter language code]_[two-letter country code].srt. For example, filename.en_US.srt. Facebook has a handy list of country codes. Instead of taking time to create that manually, we can deliver it in no time at all. Here’s how to use our services to generate them easily and accurately.

1. Go to the Rev Closed Captions page. 

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2. Click “Upload Files.” You can click “Paste a URL” if your video ad is already on Facebook

3. Choose your video file or live video URL

4. Select SubRip (.srt) as your “Output File Format” in Rev

5. Complete the checkout process.

How to import caption files into Facebook video ads

Now that you’ve received your .srt file. Here’s how to integrate your captions with your Facebook ad. 

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Click + Create.
3. Choose an objective and then click Continue.
4. Choose your targeting, placements and budget and then click Continue.
5. In the Formats section, choose Single Video or Slideshow.
6. Click Upload Video / Upload Slideshow or Browse Library to find a video for your ad.
7. In the Video Captions section, choose Upload Your Own.
8. In the window that appears, click Select file and find the .srt file you wish to upload.
9. After you select the file, click Save. Your captions upload to the video or slideshow.

Using Facebook to automatically generate captions

You can also use Facebook to automatically generate captions for your video. However, this feature only works for captions in English. Additionally, they can be every inaccurate so you will likely need to take time to edit them. Facebook uses automatic speech recognition (ASR) technology to generate these captions. Unfortunately, it is not always the most effective way to create accurate captions. Rev’s captioning service uses real people to create captions for your video with a 99%+ accuracy rate.  

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Here’s how to use Facebook to generate your captions.

1. Go to Ads Manager.
2. Click + Create.
3. Choose an objective and then click Continue.
4. Choose your targeting, placements and budget and then click Continue.
5. In the Formats section, choose Single Video or Slideshow.
6. Click Upload Video / Upload Slideshow or Browse Library to find a video for your ad.
7. In the Video Captions section, choose Generate Automatically. If your video doesn’t have sound or Facebook’s system can’t detect sound from the video, you may see Manually Add Captions instead.
8. In the Review Your Captions window, hover over the caption and edit or delete the caption, edit the length of time for the caption or insert a new caption. Tip: To keep the video from playing when entering a caption, click to check the box next to Pause video while typing.
9. Click Save To Video. Your captions upload to the video or slideshow.
10. (Optional) Click Options to delete, share or download the captions to your computer. If you share the captions, you can generate a link to your captions that expires after 72 hours.

Editing captions in Facebook video ads

Editing captions that are attached to your Facebook video is easy. However, It is important to know that when you add captions to a video ad, you are adding them to the native video and not just to the ad. That means if you decide to include the video in a new ad, the captions will appear with it. If you make a change captions in a subsequent video ad, those changes will propagate across ever ad that uses the video. If you would like to use specific captions for each ad, you may want to consider uploading a new video and caption file for each ad.

Here’s how to edit the captions in your Facebook videos step-by-step:

1. Go to your page
2. In the Publishing Tools tab select Video Library
3. Choose the video you would like to edit, and select Edit Video
4. Click on Subtitles & Captions. Your captions will be in the Captions Added tab
5. Click on the pencil icon to review and edit your captions.

More Social Media Caption Options

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