Facebook does not want to be left out of the “audio revolution”. The social network intends to enter the world of podcasts next week . In addition, it will launch a tool for listeners to create clips of their favorite shows.
According to The Verge, the firm led by Mark Zuckerberg sent an email to some owners of podcast pages. The message says that they will be able to link the RSS feed (the file that acts as a bridge between the hosting and the playback application) of their program to Facebook.
The programs published on the platform will appear in a section called “podcasts” , both in the mobile application and in the desktop version of Facebook. The strength of the social network will be to recommend content according to people's interests.
Facebook wants to be the social podcast platform
Photo by Sandra Tenschert on Unsplash In addition, it is expected that users can leave comments directly in the application and recommend them to their friends. In April, Facebook said that 170 million people follow pages linked to podcasts and more than 35 million are members of groups related to podcasts.
As with any internet service, users who decide to publish their programs on Facebook must accept the terms of service. They establish a license so that the social network can widely distribute the linked content.
As indicated at the beginning, Facebook will allow creators to enable a tool called “Clips”. This utility will provide the ability for listeners to post small clippings of up to one minute in length of podcast episodes.
The idea is apparently that these clips can be shared outside of the podcaster's page to increase the reach of their content. However, at the moment it is not clear how this function will work, as it has not yet been launched.
In principle, creators who received the email from Facebook will be able to access the podcast service. The implementation would be gradual, so that more creators can join the platform.
Facebook wants to take advantage of the fact that many podcast authors already use the social network to promote their programs. It is possible that the social network also implements a subscription service as Spotify or Apple already did.
