Podcast Transcripts: Meaning and Benefits
It is no news that podcasts are now a part of the new normal. This is evident in the number of podcast listeners that has skyrocketed over the years. A podcast is a digitally documented spoken word, usually in episodes, which can be downloaded for personal or group consumption on such digital devices as mobile phones, iPod, and computer. In the US alone, more than 155 million people were in the category of podcast listeners in 2020. The question, however, is, can you compare the versatility of comfort offered by a bare podcast to one that comes with a podcast transcript?
A podcast transcript, simply put, is a document that gives a verbatim account of the spoken words that have been digitally recorded in a textual form. In order words, it is the word-for-word representation of spoken words in the written form. This gives you as a podcaster a two-way advantage. First, it affords your listener a dual opportunity of engaging both the senses of hearing and sight while accessing the episode. It also makes your episodes more accessible to a wider range of audience.
Research has shown that a podcast without transcription is limited in terms of the scope of its target listeners as it will be only accessible to the group of audience with auditory capability, thereby exempting those with hearing impairment. Therefore, in order to ensure that your podcast breaks barriers to reach an unlimited range of listeners, there is the inevitability of hiring podcast transcription service. This s due to a number of reasons.
The WHO’s 2021 publication established the fact that there are 466 million people who have hearing disability. So,consider the millions of prospects that will be deprived access to your podcast if you send it online without a transcript. The implication is crystal clear; you will be losing hundreds of millions of prospects.If you are business oriented, you will definitely know every prospect counts, and will want your podcast to be easily accessed by all categories of internet visitors for they are your prospects.We can therefore, conclude that podcast transcripts make your episodes more accessible than anything to a broader range of audience.
Podcast transcripts undoubtedly paves the way for search engines to easily index podcasts and bring them up when they provide results to internet users’ queries. This is not because search engines are partial, they have just been designed to index transcribed podcast, since they combine both the speech and more importantly, the textual features. So, if you have wondered why some podcasts receive overwhelming downloads or streaming more than others, know that they have not used any voodoo or cut corners. It is simply because they have been transcribed. The advent of the search engine optimization system is one that has pervaded the internet. It requires that documents going online be properly tagged with the right keywords in order to be easily located by search. Going by this, only podcasters who have sought podcast transcription service will be favored.