Facebook Is All Ears—Or Could Be
Regular readers of this blog will know there’s no love lost between me and the current way of distributing podcasts. Podcast distributing? There’s a phrase begging to be redefined. Podcasts aren’t distributed. They’re discovered. And the process resembles a Keystone Kops chase, with people scrambling around iTunes, Stitcher, Spreaker, Libsyn and SoundCloud until they find themselves running in circles. That’s hardly befitting a medium that wants to be taken seriously. Wouldn’t you rather be where your audience is (surely your audience would appreciate that)? If so, this is a great time to be alive.
If You Build It Someone Will Improve It
When I first put up my podcast Facebook page, I experimented with posting excerpts from my episodes using Facebook’s video feature. My results were mixed. I didn’t have enough reach to draw any conclusions about the effectiveness of using Facebook as a podcast platform. Recently, though, WNYC, New York City’s NPR flagship station, decided to try this very thing.
Yessss.
While Facebook is a place where people park their eyes. due to a wonderful quirk of nature their ears wind up there, too. The idea of starting a podcast and then attending to one’s regular Facebook routine sounds irresistible.
Facebook? What Do They Know About Podcasting?
Other platforms may decry the move, citing the fact that Facebook doesn’t offer the kind of production tools they offer. Apple can rightly point out how easy it is to sell podcasts on iTunes. On the other hand, why is it necessary to link production and hosting? Or purchasing to iTunes? That, to me, is on the order of linking car-buying with where you can drive and where you can shop to the bank name on your checks.
One hopes that Facebook, which is already skilled in providing statistics to advertisers and has taken steps to attract native content from print publishers, will make similar tools and inducements available to those of us who choose to make Facebook the platform of choice for hosting our content. One can produce a podcast using any number of free and for-pay tools. One can sell podcast episodes using many of the e-commerce plugins or code extensions. But none of these other platforms can put us into one-on-one contact with our listeners in an environment where they’re already hanging out.
Ears to You
The perils of privacy aside, Facebook could certainly tell you when a friend or fan listened to one of your podcasts. Since its player is self-contained, it can generate listening statistics similar to those available from YouTube. From discovery through data collection, the mechanisms and tools are already there, waiting for us to use them.
As for those wretched download statistics, this is another opportunity to banish them in one, fell swoop.
The current podcasting distribution/listening system is great for geeks and hobbyists. It’s silly for a media business seeking legitimacy through a wide audience. Hosting podcasts on Facebook can be a move away from podcasting as a hobby and toward podcasting as a reliable medium.
And that’s a move that should be music to our ears.
