Coming out of the creativity of blogging and personal music players, podcasting has been around longer than most realize. With the development and inclusion of apps that play podcasts natively, the mobile devices deliver the content with ease. Couple the portability of podcasts with the increase in production quality it is little wonder why the format has increased in popularity over the last 10 years.
According to Pew and the Internet research at least 50% of those in the U.S. have listened to a podcast. The weekly listenership is up to 22% from only 7% in 2013. The reasons for the rise come down to ease of entry, increase quality in production, and delivery. The biggest reason is that podcasts provide organizations and individuals unfettered access to their audience.
In the past if an organization needed to get a message out to the general public they would create a carefully crafted press release. These releases had to make their way past gatekeepers within newsrooms across the country. There was no guarantee anyone other than the news editor would see the information.
With podcasts any organization can get news, information, and updates out to the general public as well as their stakeholders. These are pushed out to subscribers and alert the listeners a new episode is available. With push notifications the frition created by the old system of news rooms is removed.
Most anyone can get into a podcasting system relatively easily. The barrier to entry is all but gone. High-quality microphones can be bought for less than $100. The software to edit the audio range from free up to $40. Podcasts are audio files and need to be made available to the public otherwise it’s just an internal communication. Creating the RSS feed and providing access to the audio can be done through free websites like Podbean and others.
Like in other cases, organizations can spend more in general or hire out the entire process of producing a podcast. If connecting with your audience and potential stakeholders is a priority and you don’t know where to start you can reach out to us at AVNation or me, Tim@avnation.tv