The best way to caption Facebook live videos.

Addicted to Facebook? Most of us are. The social networking giant has emerged as a money-spinning platform for advertisers. And has helped people showcase their talents, skills, products and services in front of 1.71 billion active FB users

And, yes, of course you know that FB Live videos are all the rage now. 1 in 5 videos uploaded to Facebook are live videos. And the daily watch-time for Facebook Live videos has grown by more than 4 times.

Earlier this year, Facebook in a bid to become more inclusive, allowed publishers to add closed captions to their live videos. Over 38 million people in USA are deaf or hard of hearing and this welcome move will open up your videos to the hearing impaired.

Why you should get on the live captioning bandwagon

• Your videos are instantly accessible for millions of hearing impaired people.
• You’ll have more people liking, sharing and engaging with your videos.
• According to a study by Facebook, reading while watching videos increases view time by 12%
• The FCC requires live and near live videos to include captions.
• 85% of users watch FB videos without the sound on.

The more accurate DIY approach to add closed captions for FB Live videos

This is a wee bit complicated but definitely worth the effort.

Step 1: Use a text editor like Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac.

Step 2: Add the “Start” and “End” time of segments you’d like to caption.

Step 3: Name and save your file and make sure you add the .srt extension to your file name.

Step 4: Ensure that you’ve correctly formatted your file (Quick tip: To be sure you’ve formatted it right, save your file as a .TXT file. If the format is correct your text editor will know that you’ve created a captions file and will automatically save it as a .srt file)

Step 5:Go to your Facebook account and select the live video you want to add captions to.

Step 6: Open the video in “Theatre mode” by clicking on the time stamp.

Step 7: Click the “Edit this video” option under “Options”.

Step 8: Select the “Captions” option.

Step 9: Click on the “Upload .srt file” option.

Step 10: Upload your file and that’s about it.

The best option, choosing a professional captioning company to do the job

You can add captions to your Facebook Live video in simple steps by working with a third party professional captioning services provider. Several captioning companies now provide captions for live videos. Now, this is how it works…

• Use a live streaming or encoding software.
• Send your video’s livestream to the streaming server of your captioning company.
• The captioning company inserts captions and broadcasts it to your audience.

For more information on adding closed captions to Facebook Live broadcasts, click here. For more information on Facebook’s accessibility features and settings, click here.