We’ve said it before, but it bears repeating: your YouTube marketing or outreach efforts simply won’t reach the maximum audience unless you perform some basic SEO optimization.

Aside from tagging and ensuring your videos are sorted in a sensible playlist, the biggest boost to your videos’ performance is a complete and accurate transcription of what’s being said within the video itself. While YouTube’s automatic captioning service has an impressive 95% accuracy rating, it’s not going to be ADA compliant or be easily translated to other languages - unacceptable for large-scale institutions and those requiring legal compliance with state and federal regulations. Fortunately, there are strategies you can employ to increase the accuracy of your transcriptions and ensure your viewers and readers share the same experience, no matter how they find your content.

Use Audio Recording Best Practices

If possible, preparing your recording environment with the proper equipment and minimal secondary noise will help improve the quality of your final transcriptions, whether you choose a machine-based service or a human transcription service. A simple lavalier or shotgun microphone will suffice for individual recordings, but if you plan to record a lecture or an event with multiple speakers, it would be wise to employ a live sound engineer and use backup recordings to ensure no audio file is lost, damaged, or recorded improperly.

Avoid the YouTube Description Section

Despite the tendency to do so, the description field in YouTube isn’t where transcriptions should live. Instead, during the upload process, you can upload a written transcript and choose to disable the machine-generated transcription. That way, YouTube will recognize the extra effort and detail put into your video, signaling to its users that it may contain better, more accurate information than their own service.

Use a Human-Based Transcription Service

For the near future, human-based transcription services will always beat machine-based transcriptions for a simple reason: nuance. There’s no AI or neural network that can pick up on the idiosyncrasies of human speech and therefore, cannot accurately represent what’s being said in a video versus what a program assumes is being said. Professional audio transcribers spend years honing their craft and ensuring their transcriptions are accurate approaching 100%. By employing a third-party transcription service, you know your transcriptions are complete, accurate, and representative of your company. Furthermore, if you have an ongoing need for transcription services or are looking forward to a large-scale project, most firms offer flexible pricing and project delivery dates. Larger projects may often be negotiated depending on the size and desired delivery date, so if your budget for adding transcriptions to your organization’s YouTube videos is limited, a qualified transcription service can help by presenting an offer that will fit your needs.

Contact Transcription Hub today to learn more about precise, professional transcription services for your business.