How to Add Text to YouTube Videos: A Quick and Easy Guide for Creators to Enhance Engagement and Style

Wondering how to add text to YouTube videos? Well, you’ve come to the right place. You’re also making a good decision as adding text to your videos is a great way to make your content more engaging and watchable—plus, text can improve your video’s searchability as well.

However, while it might seem like an easy addition to your video content, adding text is not always as simple as you might think. If you’re a seasoned video editor, it might not be too much of a challenge, but if you’re just starting out in content creation and are a bit confused about how to add text to your videos, we’re here to help.

Let’s go over some of the best—and easiest—ways for you to add text to YouTube videos. Plus, as an added bonus, we’ll give you some additional tips and resources to help you make your videos more likely to succeed on YouTube as well.

Why add text to your videos

As mentioned above, adding text to YouTube videos is a great idea for many reasons. YouTube, in particular, really rewards videos with text as it helps to make the content hosted on its platform more accessible and enjoyable to viewers.

The approach to adding text to YouTube videos will vary based on your video editing knowledge, skills, and resources. If you’re a newbie and unsure of how to do basic video editing, you might want to try using YouTube’s built-in editor, which we’ll walk you through in a guide below.

However, suppose you know a thing or two about video editing and are comfortable working on a project in one of the best video editing softwares like Adobe Premiere Pro, Apple Final Cut Pro, or Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve. In that case, we have you covered with some helpful resources, too.

Add text to videos in YouTube

The first and easiest option for adding text to YouTube videos is to do so directly in the YouTube app. This is a fairly straightforward process. However, it does lack many of the more advanced and refined controls that you might want to truly customize how the text shows up in your videos.

Here are the steps to follow to add text to YouTube videos in the YouTube editor:

Open a project and then tap on the Text button in the toolbar.
Select Plain text or Text effects.
Type to add text.
Tap “Done” when complete.

The steps above will give you a basic set of text to add to your YouTube videos. However, if you’d like to further format the text and make adjustments, you can follow these additional steps below:

Select the text layer in your project that you’d like to edit.
From the toolbar, use the following options to edit the text:
1. Split: Cut the duration of your text.
2. Edit: Type to change the text displayed in your video
3. Style: Tap on the tabs to change the size, font, color, background, format, outline, or shadow.
4. Animation: Select an animation and use the sliders to set the duration of the effect.
Tap “Done” to update the text.
To move a text layer within your video, tap and drag it to the desired spot.

And finally, if you follow all of the steps above and aren’t happy with the text that you’ve added to your YouTube videos, you can always delete the text by following these steps:

Tap to select the text layer that you want to delete.
Tap the “Trash” icon.

How to add text to YouTube videos in different video editing apps

If you’d like to add text to YouTube videos with more refined controls, the next level option is to add text to one of your favorite video editing platforms. With these more powerful NLE software options, editors can make more advanced choices about what the text looks like and how it is displayed.

Also, with some simple keyframing techniques, editors can animate the text to be more dynamic and responsive, which should give your videos that extra degree of professionalism. Here are some helpful guides to adding text in some of the most popular video editing apps.

Add text to videos in Adobe Premiere Pro

Add text to videos in Final Cut Pro

Add text to videos in DaVinci Resolve

The best royalty free music for YouTube videos

Along with adding text to YouTube videos, adding a soundtrack is the next best way to elevate your video content to the next level. We suggest using royalty free music as it's the best—and simplest—way to license high-quality music to safely use in your videos. (You can read more about what royalty free music is here.)

We have some hand-picked royalty free music tracks that would be great options to add to your YouTube videos to give you an idea of what we're talking about. Check out some of our top picks here below:

1. Bottleneck by Neon Beach

Description: A medium-energy, electronic song that is best described as fun and happy. Bass and bass guitar are the primary instruments in this track.
BPM: 111
Key: F Major
Listen and license here.

2. Fading Amber by Lunareh

Description: A low-energy, electronic song that is best described as chill and reflective. Synth and piano are the primary instruments in this track.
BPM: 108
Key: B Major
Listen and license here.

3. Shoreline by PALA

Description: A medium-energy, electronic song that is best described as chill and happy. Ambient tones and bass are the primary instruments in this track.
BPM: 102
Key: E Major
Listen and license here.

4. Promised Land by Brian Brown

Description: A medium-energy, hip-hop song that is best described as happy and hopeful. Bass and bass guitar are the primary instruments in this track.
BPM: 96
Key: A Major
Listen and license here.

5. Anybody Out There? by Mikey Geiger

Description: A medium-energy, electronic song that is best described as chill and fun. Synth is the primary instrument in this track.
BPM: 140
Key: Eb/D# Major
Listen and license here.

You can further check out some of the best royalty free music for YouTube videos here. If you’d like to further explore some tips and tricks for creating great YouTube videos with these resources below: