How to add captions to Facebook Videos

Here are my troubleshooting tips.

So you've got your captions maybe using Rev.com, you've saved it as an .srt file but you are having problems uploading it?

Sometimes uploading a file can make you want to hit your head against a wall and I've been there when uploading my own captions for my Facebook videos. Here are my top 3 tips to successfully upload your captions for your Facebook video. 

1.  The text file needs to be encoded in UTF-8. To do this, I open a text editor and save the file again under a new name and with the right settings.

2. Make sure the file is saved as an srt file and not srt.txt file which can happen if you are using a text editor. Depending on how your desktop displays your extensions, you may need to check that your settings are set to show extensions.  I usually save two versions of the file, one with the .txt extension in case I need to make any edits, and the second version without the .txt extension to upload to Facebook.

3. Get the naming convention right. The file has to be named in a certain way. It needs to contain the language the captions are in and the country it is based in. It also has to be in the format of:

file name.[two-letter language code]_[two-letter country code).srt So for example, for my file I used: ru2c.EN_GB.srt 

Click on this link the Facebook help page, to obtain the 2 letter country code

4. Make sure you have timestamps in your file. Rev gives you the option to update the timestamps yourself or to pay a little bit more for them to add them. I always get them to add them. I did this manually once and really regretted it.

For further information, here is a link to semi-useful guide from Facebook. 

Please comment below as I would love to hear if you had any success after following this and whether you come across any other errors. Good luck!