With the myriad of audio features arriving on Facebook over the past year, the world’s leading social media platform is getting a bit of a makeover on both Android and iOS smartphones.
The Facebook app has officially created a new “Audio” section that can be found everything from podcasts, music, live audio rooms, and soundbites, as well as everything else Facebook will conjure up in the future.
This new audio hub, as seen in the screenshots below, is in the already versatile “Watch” section, which is in the little options bar that stretches across the bottom of your Facebook feed on Android phones and on top of iPhones . Facebook “Music” is also included as a separate tab to the left of the “Audio” area.
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It seems a little counter-intuitive that all of the new audio features are placed in an overarching tab called “Watch”, but maybe Facebook will notice the entire section and rename it to “Watch and Listen” – as it almost certainly is there will be as much material to listen to as there will be to watch at some point.
According to Facebook, the audio feed of podcasts and other content will evolve over time to best suit your interests and preferences using special algorithms, similar to your YouTube feed or the normal Facebook feed “Watch”.
While the “Audio” category contains the most popular listening content when you first launch it, along with all of the YouTubers you’ve already followed, Facebook quickly picks up what you like to deliver a personalized feed of recommendations.
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While Facebook’s “audio” hub began being available to users some time ago, the company officially announced it today, along with news about some of its unfortunate limitations. For the record, the audio hub will only be available to Facebook users in the United States and to those ages eighteen and over.
As always, international users only see the regular tabs “For you”, “Live”, “Follow” etc. in the “Watch” area. Facebook has promised to receive the versatile “Audio” tab at some point in the future, but this luxury will only be enjoyed by US citizens for the time being.
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If you are lucky enough to live outside the US, you may already be using some of Facebook’s other audio features: Live audio rooms and soundbites. The former started rolling out much earlier this summer, and Facebook has now announced that it is working to expand its availability to an even wider global audience. So, if you haven’t seen this on your Facebook app before, you could be in the next few weeks.
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Live audio rooms have recently become available on desktop too, so you can enter a live chat room and connect with others using your computer instead of just your phone. It has certainly built a reputation to justify its expansion, attracting Hollywood stars like Miley Cyrus, Noah Cyrus, comedian Sherry Cola, and many more.
On the other hand, while Live Audio Rooms was something of a spin-off of the popular clubhouse app, Soundbites could be played by TikTok’s short-form video format. Soundbites is also being rolled out gradually to users around the world.
While podcasts are a relative novelty on Facebook, only becoming available in the US this summer, Facebook’s fast-growing hub for all types of listening content is pretty steadily on the rise.
However, it is still far too early to predict whether Facebook will ever be able to rival YouTube, for example, in terms of content availability and popularity. There is certainly still a long way to go, especially given Facebook’s recent controversy before the U.S. Senate and one of the longest downtime the platform has seen last week.
If you’re one of the lucky US users who got access to the new “Audio” hub in the “Watch” section of Facebook, we’d love your feedback in the comments section below.
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