Content is a king for social media and if prepared right, it can make a big difference in your sales and marketing. Content production is a challenging process and simplifying it will save a lot of effort and time for your content marketing team. The content for your marketing materials doesn’t always mean text. You can find lots of useful information in videos, lectures, audiobooks, podcasts, and webinars. 

One of the ways to create new content with minimum effort is transcription. Transcription is converting your audio or video materials into text by using automated tools or hiring a professional transcriber. In this article, you will learn how to use it for your SMM purposes. 

How to make transcriptions? 3 Ways

If you want to transcribe audio or video, you can go for three different options, each having its specifics. 

Do it manually by yourself

This is the first option that comes up to your mind. It is the most suitable option when the transcript is not long and relatively easy. If the information from the source video or audio file is too complex, it may take hours, if not days of hard work. For non-professionals, transcription can be a too demanding process. When you have an opportunity, it is better to hand over this process to professionals to properly transcribe it.

Try automated transcription

As an optimal choice, the automated transcription helps you receive the ready transcripts in just a couple of minutes. This is a fast and affordable opportunity to transcribe your audio or video to text. The downside of this option is that AI-based tools don’t always offer 100% accurate results. For low-quality source files, it is better to use human-based transcription services. However, many transcription services use AI algorithms to extract background noise, identify different speakers and catch complex words and terms. 

Hire a professional transcriber

This method offers maximum accuracy, even for the most complex transcripts. However, it is much more expensive and time-consuming than using automated tools. We recommend using manual transcription only if the source file is low-quality and contains specialized vocabulary. In all other cases, an automated transcription service is an ideal price-quality option.

If you can’t decide between manual and automated transcription, here are the things you should pay attention to while analyzing your source file:

• the overall quality of your file (background noise, indistinct sounds, wind, and other distractions)
• number of speakers (accents they have, non-native speakers, interruptions, people speaking at the same time)
• vocabulary used (specific words like terms, topic of the speech, slang)
• length of the source file

How do transcription services work?

Regardless of the transcription type: automated or manual, all transcription services work according to the same principle. You share the video or audio file to transcribe, pay for the services, and receive the ready text after some time. For automated transcription, it takes a few minutes and if you hire a professional transcriptionist, it can take up to several days. You can always review the results and point out the mistakes for your author. 

Here is how you can use transcripts to repurpose your content for social media.

Using transcripts as outlines for social media or blog posts

Most professional transcription services companies will help you in formatting your transcripts so that you can easily understand their main topic. You can turn these transcripts into the outlines of social media or blog posts. They can be used to get organic traffic, increase the shares on social networks and draw new leads.

It is easier to extend the formatted transcripts into a roadmap to shape your thoughts into complete articles. They will simplify your work and save your time on writing content from scratch. Backing up with creativity, you can create a few kinds of content from a single transcription piece. For instance, while working on blog posts or other large-format texts, you can single out the most essential sentences and turn them into quotes or descriptions for your social media collateral. You can even create templates to share quotes on different social media platforms. This makes all the content more interconnected and simplifies the work of your content managers. This way, the brand receives more interactions with the audience. 

Turn your transcripts into lead magnets

Another way to use transcriptions is for sales purposes. This content can further be used as sponsored materials, eBooks, or other downloadables. You can distribute this content along with your social media materials. Its aim is to attract new leads, expand customer reach, and fill the customer pipelines for your business. 

As a rule, ready transcription pieces are well-formated and structured so you don’t need much additional work from your editors to turn this text into something readers will be willing to buy. all you need is to hire a designer to create a cover page, table of contents, and illustrations if needed and relevant. This is the way to boost the results of your marketing campaigns without investing much time and effort.

Sharing content on multiple platforms

Video and audio transcripts can be formatted for sharing on various platforms and social media. After analyzing the transcripts, you can easily reshape them and extract the most essential information to create the most comprehensible and suitable types of content for every platform. For example, you can make a short video for Instagram Reels, infographics for Pinterest, a long video for YouTube and Vimeo, and a presentation for your website. And this all can be made with a single piece of transcribed content. Wonderful, isn’t it?

This all can increase brand awareness and draw user attention with the most fitting content forms. 

Use this content for the email and social media marketing

According to the statistics, 29% of marketers rate email marketing as the most effective marketing channel (25% for social media, 22% for SEO, and 25% for content marketing). Transcripts can be turned into content for your email newsletters. For these objectives, speed also plays a crucial role. You can enrich your email campaigns with the most actual materials as you can quickly turn the latest videos, meetings, recordings podcasts, or lectures into text. This adds value to your brand as you share timely, relevant, and in-demand content with your potential customers. 

Enhancing your SEO

Apart from content and emails, SEO is also a powerful tool for your marketing activities. Before we start diving into this topic, it’s necessary to clarify that apart from content, your website should comply with multiple standards and technical characteristics. So before you start optimizing your web content, you need to work on the technical SEO aspect first. Only combined with it, SEO can bring the desired outcomes. 

This point is especially important if you have an online store and want to increase its ranking on search engines. You need to assess and optimize everything – from text to images presented. It’s also important to mention that search engine robots don’t crawl videos and audio, they only crawl text. That’s why you need to transcribe your content and enhance it with various relevant keywords. This way, search engines can index your pages properly. 

After you transcribe your content, you need to research the most relevant keywords for your brands. Here are the elements of your web page you need to incorporate keywords in:

• title, description, meta title, and meta description
• headings and subheadings
• page text
• ALT descriptions for images
• URLs

Pay attention to adding different forms of your keywords and avoid keyword stuffing. Remember that you write text for real users, not robots. The content should be accurate, structured, and readable.

Wrapping up

Transcription services are real time-savers for your marketing and sales teams. There are hundreds of content forms you can turn your transcripts into. With transcription services, you can create shareable and downloadable content that fits your marketing goals and engages users the most. To receive accurate transcripts quickly, automated transcription tools are an optimal choice for covering your needs.