Most people will watch your video with the sound off

You record a good thirty seconds. Clear explanation, decent audio, you sound like you know what you are talking about.

Then it plays in a feed, silently, while someone stands in a queue. They see a person's mouth moving and nothing else. They scroll.

How much of it is silent

The honest answer is that nobody has a current, reliable number. The figure everyone quotes — that 85% of Facebook video is watched without sound — comes from trade press in 2016 and was attributed loosely even then. We would not build a plan on it.

The better-sourced finding comes from a survey of 5,616 US consumers aged 18 to 54: 69% said they watch video with the sound off in public places, and 80% said they were more likely to finish a video if captions were available. Self-reported, but a real sample.

The direction is not controversial. Platforms autoplay muted, people watch in public, and sound is opt-in.

Design for silence first

This does not mean abandon audio. It means the video has to work twice: once silently, then better with sound.

• Burn in captions. Not platform auto-captions, which are inconsistent and sometimes wrong in ways that are worse than nothing. Captions that are part of the file.
• Make the first frame a statement. Not your logo. Not a slow pan. The claim, in words, before anyone has decided.
• Show the thing. If you are talking about a result, the result should be on screen while you talk about it.

The talking head problem

A person speaking to camera is the hardest format to save with captions, because the visual carries almost nothing. The caption becomes the whole message, and reading is slower than listening.

The fix is not to stop making them. It is to cut away. Every ten seconds or so, show what is being described — the property, the plate, the chair, the site. The speech becomes narration over evidence rather than a face in a box.

One quick test

Before you publish anything, mute it and watch it on your phone at arm's length.

If you cannot tell what it is about in the first three seconds, the problem is not reach or posting time or the algorithm. The problem is that the video only exists with the sound on, and most of your audience is never going to turn it on.