About Joe’s and Ali’s content creation process
With 4.2 billion social media users globally, more and more creators are sharing content with social media subtitles and breaking through the noise. How are they doing it? They’re building value-driven brands by making the most of each piece of content they’re putting out. At least that’s how Joe is helping Ali Abdaal and his team to reach millions of viewers.
About Joe
Joe Gannon works with online creators like YouTuber, Ali Abdaal, to repurpose and optimise his video content across various social channels. Joe uses Subly to add captions and maximise the impact of Ali's work, to reach an even wider audience and to have an efficient workflow.
About Ali's channel
With over 1.5 million YouTube subscribers, Ali prioritises expanding his content’s lifespan on social media through the help of subtitles and SRT files to keep up with his audience. For him, repurposing social media videos with burned-in captions in the form of 'fire moments', as he calls them, is crucial. This way, he makes sure he's keeping all of his audiences engaged across the multitude of platforms.
Although, smoothly running his YouTube channel and podcast series alongside his social media can be a challenge, especially when they need to also resize and add captions to each piece of content.
Together with his team and Joe, they’ve cracked a secret formula that enables them to drive value without compromising the consistency or quality of their social media videos and content. And, without spending any more time than needed on editing and adding captions!
What helped them to spend less time editing and more time creating content for social media?
The time-efficient workflow that Joe had established for repurposing Ali’s content.
The challenge–to add social media subtitles
Content creators will spend days adding captions and editing subtitles on one video. Perhaps, even weeks. For Joe, this wasn’t a good enough option, so he set out to create a better workflow.
Joe started his agency to help other content creators maximise the impact of their organic content efforts. When Joe began working with Ali, he knew content repurposing would be a big part of their workflow.
“My own content focuses on how to build an organic content marketing strategy that will generate new business and establish a personal brand that pulls in opportunities,” says Joe. “So, I am fascinated in finding ways to build processes and systems that enable seamless content marketing.”
As Ali’s YouTube channel grew in popularity, he recognised that to successfully balance his time between being a doctor and a YouTuber, his content would have to be the gold standard.
This meant accessibility with subtitles, consistency and multi-channel impact.
As a content creator, Joe saw the impact repurposed content could have on brands. He also knew that growing Ali’s channels would involve finding time-efficient solutions like repurposing and automatically adding captions to his content.
His primary challenge was cutting down the number of steps it took to get a piece of content social-media-ready. Whether it’s podcast episodes, social media videos, or a YouTube description, he needed a tool to help him get his content looking top-notch.
He needed something that would reduce the 15 steps of overall video editing in multiple tools to preferably fewer steps in just one tool.
What were the key tools they needed apart from subtitles?
It was essential to create a workflow that condensed a lot of repurposing tasks into just a few steps.
They needed:
- styling templates
- full control over the look and feel of subtitles and headlines
- ability to resize social media videos ready to post
- easily export TXT files, videos with burned-in captions and, SRT files for open captions for socials
This workflow meant that Joe could create high-quality content frequently enough to help Ali expand his reach onto new platforms to find new audiences, whilst still maintaining existing channels.
The solution
Before Subly, repurposing content for Joe involved days in front of Final Cut Pro.
There really wasn’t an all-in-one solution for transcribing, adding captions, styling and resizing video and audio files, and exporting it all with an SRT file. Or at least one that didn’t involve a high level of skill and hours of his day in front of the screen.
Access to Subly Pro meant that Joe could focus more on strategy and less on the nitty-gritty details of finding new (and interesting) ways of editing, repurposing, and adding closed captions and open captions to content faster.
“One of the biggest limitations of other tools is the difficulty of selecting how you want subtitles and on-screen text to look,” says Joe. "Subly has helped me to create videos with subtitles in a system that saves time and has an increased output!”
Joe uploads video clips made from podcasts and interviews, adds captions to them, adds branding and styling to them in Subly, and then exports in different aspect ratios like an SRT file, for various social media platforms.
What used to take Joe hours now takes him a matter of minutes.
So what changed in his process?
He found an all-in-one tool for making Ali’s videos social-media-ready.
Ali Abdaal said: “My team love using Subly to save time and repurpose my YouTube content with subtitles ready for different platforms.”
What does their social media workflow look like now?
Today, Joe's process to Ali's content looks like editing his video in Final Cut Pro, running it through Subly for automatic transcription, subtitling with closed captions and open captions (SRT file), and resizing to share content across social media in different formats with his exported TXT file as the caption.
Joe loves using Subly because he can download TXT files which he uses as my first iteration of the social media copy– it saves him a lot of time when posting online.
The result–“Subly has literally given me back hours each week.”
With the help of Subly, Joe found an easy and fast way to support Ali with his content.
From the 15 steps Joe would typically take in Final Cut Pro, he was able to simplify the process by completing 7 of them in Subly.
“The Subly team was so supportive, and it's been incredible to see their tool go from strength to strength,” said Joe. "Subly has literally given me back hours each week.”
Ali’s videos with subtitles could be ready for export within minutes thanks to the easy-to-use automatic transcription, subtitling, styling, and SRT file export features. This is how he transforms one piece of content into as many as Ali needs to keep growing his social media channels at a fast pace!
What's next?
Ali is still a Doctor working in the UK, and during his one-year sabbatical to explore other interests, he grew his YouTube channel to over 1.5M subscribers. Ali still creates content, writes his newsletter and runs a weekly podcast, ‘Not Overthinking’.
Joe is now on his way to hiring his first employee thanks to establishing a proactive workflow that’s helped him grow to a profitable agency. Joe works with creators, business owners, and entrepreneurs to repurpose their content across social channels. He also collaborates with teams including Speechify, Shield Analytics and of course, Subly.
