Written by Gary Logsdon
As a food blogger, you may be producing multiple types of content, much of which may be written on your blog. However, you may also be creating video content such as YouTube videos, webinars and Facebook live videos. You might also have a podcast with audio content. In the latter two cases, it is often beneficial to provide that content in a written form as well.
There are numerous ways to turn the audio into text, which is called "transcription". Recent advances in speech recognition technologies have made transcription much easier. This article will provide you with some reasons that you may want to consider creating transcripts as a reasonable way for you to make your content more accessible.
You may be wondering why it would make sense to transcribe your audio content to text. There are a number of reasons that you might want to consider making the investment in transcription to better serve your Fans.
As food bloggers, our content often contains recipes that we would like our Fans to try. This is much easier if the recipe ingredients and instructions are also available as text for them to easily follow.
If you have audio and video content on your website, search engines cannot determine its topics like when crawling your text. If you provide transcriptions of that content, search engines will better understand your content and typically increase the traffic coming to your site. A Case Study with SafeNet is an excellent example of this in action. Similar results were achieved with a case study done by This American Life. For the same reason, adding closed captions to videos will help videos rank higher in YouTube search results.
When learning something new, I often will watch a video or two, Conversely, Jason prefers to scan a few articles. We all have our personal preferences when it comes to consuming content. By providing transcriptions associated with your audio and video content, you can better address the full spectrum of your readers' learning preferences. It will allow them to consume your content in the manner they prefer. This will improve your readers' retention and keep them coming back for more.
There are also many environments that are not conducive to consuming audio content. This could include noisy environments or locations that would require the use of headphones to avoid disturbing others. Having a transcript and/or closed captions will give your viewers an alternative, so they can continue consuming your content and not moving on.
Due to the huge amount of content available on the Internet, most folks have become proficient at quickly skimming the text to locate content of interest. This highlights perhaps one of the greatest disadvantages of audio and video content, it cannot be skimmed. If there is a transcription available for the audio and/or video content, it can be quickly scanned to determine if it's worth watching or listening to.
If you want your content to appeal to an international audience, a transcription of your audio or video content is critically important. Many non-English speakers struggle to understand fluid conversations and having a transcription, or especially closed captioning, makes it much easier for them to follow along and engage with your content.
Text is also much easier to translate into other languages using a variety of online translation services. This will allow non-English speakers to understand and engage with your content.
The availability of a transcript, especially closed captioning, will also allow access to your content by those individuals with hearing impairments. This lets nearly everyone access and interact with the content you post on your website or social media accounts.
Providing accessible alternatives for those with hearing impairments demonstrates your brand's social responsibility and has the potential to open up interaction with a whole new audience.
You work hard to create compelling video and audio content for your Fans. By making the investment to create transcripts of that audio, you can repurpose the content to make it available to a different and wider audience; this will allow you to expand your brand and help more of your Fans.
Have you decided to add audio transcriptions to your content mix? Learn What are the Factors When Selecting a Transcription Service? or learn more about the options for transcribing, including Free Transcription Services and Why We Didn't Use One, Paid Automated Transcription Services, and Paid Manual Transcription Services.
How do you approach this? Let me know in the Makin Bacon Facebook Group or the comments below.
