I can't hear you...and that's a good thing for Facebook Video

Our movement from the desktop to the laptop to the mobile device has required us to rethink a bunch of things.

Take video. I've been experimenting with Facebook Video a little bit myself, and others are definitely using it in a variety of ways. But before you take the video plunge, consider this bit of wisdom from AdAge:

Facebook users are voting with their ears; more than 85% of videos are now played without turning the sound on.

Why? Because, as AdAge notes, people viewing video on mobile devices find sound to be intrusive. If you thought sound was intrusive back in the 1990s when your desktop computer would surf to auto-play MIDI files, consider the situation today. You might be sitting in an airport, or in a coffee shop, or in your cubicle, and the last thing that you want to happen is to have sound blaring out of your phone.

But you can caption your videos; in fact, for some customers Facebook can do this automatically. I've tested this feature; here is the video with unedited captions.



And yes, I've already broken AdAge's tip 2, "work with a vertical screen."

Let's fix that. And let's actually add captions after the fact to a Facebook Live video.