Facebook is pulling out of podcasts and plans to remove them altogether from the social-media service starting June 3.
Part of Meta Platforms Inc., Facebook will stop letting people add podcasts to the service starting this week, according to a note sent to partners. It will discontinue both its short-form audio product Soundbites and remove its central audio hub. (Source: Yahoo! Finance.)
Gone will be the days of adding your RSS feed to your Facebook page and enjoying the automation of newly released episodes automatically flowing into the platform.
You’ll have two options:
This also means you need to consider your covert art. Sometimes what pulls in from Apple and Spotify by default isn’t the best to represent a specific episode. If you have the capacity, creating imagery for specific episodes can be a great way to drive engagement.
Though we are surprised to see Facebook jump ship on podcasts, their absence from high profile conferences in 2022, such as Podcast Movement Evolutions did give some indication this was a possibility. We’ll miss the ease of importing episodes directly, but as podcasters, one little change won’t stop us from getting our content into the world.
