Video will account for 82 percent of all consumer internet traffic by 2021, according to Cisco – so it’s probably wise to invest in some video for your marketing plan.

But here’s the kicker: Most videos viewed on mobile (and sometimes desktop) are viewed without sound. Autoplay videos on Facebook, for instance, are muted until users click to turn on audio. So your fantastic content is now a silent film.

Enter: closed captions and subtitles.

Closed captioning increases video viewing by up to 40 percent. Plus, companies adding closed captions to existing video content report an immediate 14 percent lift in engagement on social media.

So what exactly is closed captioning?

Closed captioning and subtitling both involve text displayed on a video – usually dialogue, but sometimes also music and sound effects. The difference is:

• Closed captioning is a separate file uploaded with the video that tells the platform when to display the words. You can turn closed captioning on and off. It should be the choice for most videos.
• Subtitles are text-edited into the actual video, the same way other graphics and supers are added to video – so you can’t turn them on and off. This would typically only be for translating dialogue of a different language.