It's Time To Address Podcasting's Facebook Problem [S3E4]

We podcasters have come to rely quite heavily on Facebook. From podcaster-ran support groups to the ability to quickly build a Facebook community for the listeners of your podcast to the comment sections on our websites are powered by a plugin that uses Facebook, we podcasters relegate a lot of what we do to Facebook. 

So what happens when Facebook goes away? 

I know that sounds very alarmist. But hen's the last time you updated your MySpace profile? 

On a long enough time scale, everything disappears or changes into something unrecognizable from its origins. 

July 2020 is only nine days old as of this writing, and Facebook is taking a very public beating. It failed its own civil rights audit (https://about.fb.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Civil-Rights-Audit-Final-Report.pdf) , a two-year endeavor where Facebook-selected independent auditors struggled to find good evidence that Facebook actually wants to fix the rot happening from within. 

Representatives from the Anti-Defamation League, the NAACP, ad Color of Change met via conference call with Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and other top Facebook officials this week. Those reps left the call angrier than they were at the start (https://colorofchange.org/press_release/color-of-change-responds-to-facebooks-civil-rights-audit/) , citing little in the way of substantive change and an abundance of oft-repeated platitudes from Facebook rather than actually responding to the group’s demands.

Along with those PR nightmares, Facebook’s taking a financial hit this month from the #StopHateForProfit campaign (https://www.stophateforprofit.org/) as several big-ticket advertisers have stopped their ad spend on Facebook for the month. 

Facebook’s brand is being tarnished. And that tarnishment will spill over to people - and podcasts -- who actively use Facebook. It’s only a matter of when. I’m mostly concerned with the spill-over that tarnishes the reputations of the companies and organizations that continue to rely on and actively promote the use of Facebook. A lot of podcasts and podcasters fit that bill.

The steps podcasters can take to protect themselves from the coming blowback are a little unclear to me, to be really honest with you. 

One option is to diversify. That's always a good idea. Never put your eggs in one basket. It’s why we podcasters distribute our shows to every single listening app, directory, or platform. So yes, you should diversify your social media presence as a podcaster and for your podcast(s). 

Some podcasts are trying to own the relationship with their listeners directly, reducing their reliance on social media platforms as the center of their community. This is problematic because it’s important for all podcasts and podcasters to meet people where the people are. Don’t assume that people will switch to your owned property just because you’ve made the decision to shut down your shows’ Facebook group. If you build it, they probably won’t come. 

But there is one thing you can do immediately: stop pushing people to Facebook.

Even if you have a thriving, active community on Facebook right now, you can keep it and you can stop pushing new people to it. That’s my approach. Even though my community is neither very large nor very active, I still push out episodes of Buffer (https://buffer.com/) as I’m sharing that same content on other social platforms as well. To me, Facebook has become a little-to-no-effort publishing destination 

But I'm certainly not asking anybody to join me over on Facebook. And if Facebook’s reputation continues to be torn to shreds, maybe you shouldn't either.

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