How to Add Subtitles and Auto-Captions for Instagram Reels

What’s the first thing you do right after you open your eyes in the morning? After snoozing that alarm for 13 times, you open Instagram and watch reels.

Don’t you?

Well, I do. My friends, my boss, my teammates, my neighbors, and their partners do, too.

Instagram has a monthly active users of 2 Billion and I'm sure my friends are not the only ones who watch reels as soon as they wake up and right before they go to sleep.

But most of these people watch videos on mute. Stats show that over 83%^[1] of mobile users watch videos without the sound on.

There are exceptions (obviously) as long as you’re grooving to the trending songs and hook steps, you have to optimize your content for these silent-scrollers — also known as people who watch their videos on mute.

If you’re a content creator who creates educational content, then you have to go a step beyond just adding trending music and add subtitles to your videos.

Here are the top benefits of adding Subtitles to Instagram Reels:

1. Boosts the video SEO
2. It helps the audience with hearing impairment to watch your videos easily
3. Translating subtitles into other languages helps you reach a wider audience

There are two best ways to add subtitles to your Instagram reels, stories, or even longer videos:

i) Using the Captions features on Instagram (But this one has its own limitations. We’ll discuss it in a bit)

ii) Using an AI Subtitle Generator like Vmaker AI video editor (It has many options to customize your subtitles)

Now, if you want to explore both ways one by one, keep reading.

But if you want to skip to the solution to customize your subtitles, then jump here.

Upload your Video on Instagram

To add the Captions, upload your video on the Instagram Reels section. Then, click on the Edit Video button. Here’s in the toolkit bar, you’ll see the Captions button like this:

After you click on the Captions button, Instagram will start generating the captions for your video. Then, you can pick a text style that you like and then play around with the colors as you like.

As I said earlier in the blog, adding subtitles to Instagram reels within Instagram has some downsides:

• Less to no options to customize the captions by changing the font type, color, or size
• Editing the captions generated by Instagram is cumbersome
• For most of the videos, you can only generate captions in the original language of the video
• Auto-translated captions are often not accurate

To make subtitles more appealing, you can try AI Subtitle Generators or AI video editors in the market. While you can still add subtitles manually, it’s definitely an unnecessary and non-creative workload.

So, here’s our suggestion on how you can do it.

ii) How to add Subtitles to Instagram Reels with multiple variations (and different languages)

Step 1: Go to vmaker.com and sign up if you haven’t already.

Step 2: Click on the ‘Edit With AI’ option

After clicking on it, select the ‘Apply Viral Editing Style’ option and click on the ‘Upload Videos’ button.

If you’ve already used Vmaker and have uploaded videos to it, you can choose it from My Uploads as well.

You can also upload your videos by opening an empty project.

Step 3: Choose A Style

After uploading your video and selecting the aspect ratio, you’ll see an option like shown below to select the style you want.

Note: These Viral Style presets are inspired from the trending content creators style on social media. So, you can pick one that goes well with your videos.

Once you pick a Viral Style you think will go well with your video, Vmaker AI will start applying the subtitles with the right animation for your video.

And that’s it! Your video with subtitles will look like this!

You can watch the entire tutorial here:

But if you want to customize your subtitles on your own, you can start with an empty project. I’ll show you how.

- Right after uploading your video, click on the Subtitles button in the left bottom corner and a slider will appear like this.

Then, click on the Auto-Generate button and choose the language you want to generate subtitles in.

Tip: Unlike other AI Subtitle Generators in the market, Vmaker AI helps you to generate subtitles in another language right after uploading — instead of generating them in the video’s language and then translating it to another language.

- Customize the subtitles by clicking on the Subtitle Styles button on the top bar.

You can increase the font size, color, style, type, etc, and create your own subtitle style as you like.

Try out Vmaker AI subtitles today by clicking here

Do you like this blog? If you’ve made it this far, we’re happy that you are here. Please tell us your favorite method of adding subtitles, your go-to method to edit videos, or your favorite holiday destination in the comments section!

Relevant reading:

• How to Generate Accurate Subtitles in Foreign Language
• How to Auto Caption Screen Recording Videos?
• How to Turn Google Slides into Videos with Audio and CC
• How to record Zoom, Google Meet, or any online meeting with subtitles?
• How to add subtitles or captions to Zoom meeting recordings
• How to Add Multilingual Subtitles to your videos with use cases