Testing audio sharing on social media
I have always been interested in how users experience and engage with audio online (outside of podcast and music apps).
In 2015-2016, I was NPR's editorial lead on a pilot with Facebook to test an experimental native audio player. I selected promising clips from hours of programming each day, isolated them in an audio editor, and wrote intriguing headlines and social copy to share on the main NPR Facebook page.
We learned a lot from the experiment — namely that it's hard to entice users to play (and unmute) an audio clip in a social media feed, despite my best efforts.
I wrote about our findings in Nieman Lab was later invited to share those learnings as the keynote speaker for a social audio conference at Sweden Public Radio. I also organized an internal working group focused on social audio at NPR so folks from our product, data, social, and newsroom teams could regularly share and test hypotheses around sharing audio.