104: Bye-Bye, Stitcher; Hello, New LinkedIn; Happy Bday, Podcasting
This week, I’m recapping major news that’s relevant to you in the podcasting industry.
Three bigs things:
Stitcher is going away
New research shows that listeners really want transcripts
No more going viral on LinkedIn
I also discuss the 20th anniversary of podcasting—with Christopher Lydon’s first episode being published on July 9th, 2003!
RESOURCES
Christopher Lydon’s first podcast episode
Entrepreneur article on LinkedIn’s algorithm changes
Transcript
00:00:10
Welcome back to Podcast Launchpad. I'm Kelly. Doing something a bit different today. Instead of a specific topic or an interview, I thought I'd do a recap of some important and relevant podcasting news that came out last week. Well, one piece isn't specifically podcasting, but it's still relevant because it has to do with social media.
00:00:30
So podcasting is probably not your life like it is mine. So you may not be keeping up on all podcasting news. Changes and updates are constantly happening in the podcasting industry that are important for you to know. So I thought I'd do a little test of sharing some key bits of news with you every week, at least when there is something that I think you should know.
00:00:55
All right. First big news is that the podcast app, Stitcher, is shutting down. Stitcher is the oldest podcast app. It's even older than the Apple iTunes Store. Now, what does this shutdown mean for you? The main thing is, if you've got any Stitcher links on your website, you'll need to remove all of those. I had a link on my main podcast page on my business website, so I went in and already deleted that.
00:01:26
You don't wanna be sending listeners to an app that's on its way out. Next news, new statistics from the podcast host Acast indicate that podcast listeners and viewers really want transcripts. 79% of listeners want a transcript for searching, and 78% of viewers want to read closed captions on videos.
00:01:57
Now, YouTube will auto generate closed captions, but if you go ahead and burn the captions into the video yourself, you'll be sure that the text is correct in the captions. You know, sometimes YouTube's auto generating the captions can make some mistakes. Now, I know that creating transcripts and captions is really time consuming,
00:02:23
even when you use Descript, otter.ai, or some other transcript, transcript generating service. I used to do transcripts at Marketing Chat Podcast. They took so long that I didn't do them here at Podcast Launchpad, even though I mostly edit in Descript, and Descript automatically generates transcriptions. But there have been so many corrections that I had to make that I just didn't wanna take the time to edit those myself or to pay someone else to edit them for me.
00:03:04
However, when I was editing last week, I noticed that the transcription in Descript was the best one I have ever seen. More of the punctuation was correct, and that is the biggest thing for me. Usually the punctuation is all wrong, like a period is here instead of there. There should be a comma here instead of a period.
00:03:33
Stuff like that, and it just takes so long to go in and correct all of that. Or there'd be a capital letter here at the beginning of this word, and it should be a lowercase. And if you use Descript, you know how long that takes. So I just wasn't doing it. I was editing an hour long episode last week, and the transcription was so good that I ended up burning the captions and did the video myself, and adding the transcript to ca,
00:04:03
Captivate. So we'll see how future edits go. I'd love to keep adding captions and transcripts, especially since clearly listeners want them and maybe Descript, they, Descript is constantly upgrading the software, and I did notice that when I opened up the software, it read at the bottom, update available, please restart.
00:04:29
Or do you want to restart? And so I did. And maybe one of those updates updated their transcription service. So we'll see. By the way, transcripts are really great for boosting the SEO of your website, if you put the transcript on your website on a page, not a pdf. You can put it in the body of your episode post on your website, or, if you want to double the SEO of each episode, you can put the transcript on a separate post with a link in that post,
00:05:09
back to the listen post. So that's what I was doing at Marketing Chat Podcast. Now, I did also offer a downloadable transcript as a pdf. I'm not sure I'll do that anymore. It just, the PDFs don't improve your SEO because they aren't searchable. They're just a nice touch to have for website visitors. But again, that takes extra time.
00:05:30
So you know, you just have it on a page on your website, and I think that's enough. All right. Next big piece of news, and this one is big, if you use LinkedIn. Again, this isn't pod, directly podcast related, but it is related for sharing your podcast. Going viral on LinkedIn is out. In fact, according to LinkedIn's, editor-in-chief, Dan Roth, going viral is quote, not celebrated internally.
00:06:03
LinkedIn realized that some users were trying to game the system just to get as many likes and generalized comments as they could, trying to make it essentially a popularity contest. So LinkedIn recently changed their algorithm so that it's really tough to go viral, which is great because it doesn't matter how many people you reach if you're not reaching the right
00:06:31
people. So according to an article in Entrepreneur, link in this episode's post on my website, LinkedIn made two big changes in its feed. First, when you post on LinkedIn, there's now a greater chance that your followers will actually see your post. LinkedIn got feedback from users that they weren't seeing enough posts from people they follow.
00:06:57
So LinkedIn changed it to make it so that you now see more posts from the people you actually follow. You know how people are constantly posting on Facebook, how they're missing all these posts from people they follow there. LinkedIn doesn't want that to happen. Whether that's actually happening on face, uh, happening for real on Facebook or not right now.
00:07:18
The second big change that LinkedIn made was prioritizing posts that share knowledge and advice. So don't share photos of your pets or your family barbecue. Make sure to share relevant and valuable information. LinkedIn also suggests that you share info that is totally relevant to what you do, that is, within your industry, and that is geared toward a specific audience.
00:07:49
Doing that will give your posts a much greater chance of being seen and being seen by the right people. I mean, really, that's what we should be doing anyway. So it's great that LinkedIn is now prioritizing posts that're basically Doing it right. Finally, yesterday, July 9th was the 20th anniversary of the first official podcast episode.
00:08:16
On July 9th, 2003, Christopher Lydon at the Harvard Law School put his latest, then latest, episode of Christopher Lydon interviews online as an RSS feed or connected to an RSS feed. Lydon's was the first real podcast because it was audio connected to an RSS feed that could be passed through iTunes to be transferred to an iPod. And that's how podcasting got its name. Pod iPod.
00:08:52
Cast. So, you know, like broadcast. IPod Broadcast. Podcast. RSS feeds did already exist, of course, for text-based blogs, but not for audio until Dave Winer set up Lydon's audio to do that. Internet radio shows also already existed. The New England Patriots started PFW in Progress in August, 2000, but you couldn't download the audio to an iPod.
00:09:24
Lydon and Winer changed all of that. With Lydon's show and Winer's tech, listeners could finally listen to Internet audio on the go on their iPods. So, happy belated birthday podcasting. That's it for today. I'll be back Wednesday with a regular episode. Be sure to follow this show so you don't miss a single episode, and I'll see you next time on Podcast launchpad.
