Racket is a new ‘socal network’, it allows you to record short audio posts up to 9 minutes long without the extra work involved in setting up a podcast. The social part is listening, liking, sharing, taking part in ‘community’ audio threads (called volleys) and messaging other users

At the time of writing (June 2021) Racket is still a ‘beta’ or ‘closed’ application.

• Register to secure your handle
• Get 3 followers in order to ‘use’ racket

The easiest way to get 3 followers is to share this on social media, or start following people in the hope they follow you back.

Why Join Racket?

Why join any new social network?

• to secure your handle so that you have a consistent brand presence on all platforms
• to experiment
• because you don’t know how well it will do in the future

What New Content Opportunities does Racket Open Up?

Another reason for joining is… what does it allow you to do that you can’t do now?

Creating audio content and releasing it live can be quite hard.

If you create audio content, where do you host it?

Does anyone really use audio content on Twitter, Linkedin, Instagram etc. - these are primarily visual platforms.

Podcasts require hosting and are little more formal, which more expectations of a ‘show’.

Racket allows you to record short audio broadcasts, with little preparation and host them on a site at no cost.

You could:

• view it as free audio hosting.
• use it to send audio messages to yourself as a todo list if you wanted

What Technical Capabilities Does Racket Offer?

When I’m evaluating new sites and tools I like to look at the technical capabilities, because this give me ideas about repurposing and adding the site into my existing content strategies.

Racket offers the following technical features:

• recording up to 9 minute audio, through a browser
• convering the audio to mp3 and hosting on Amazon S3
• auto transcriptions of the audio to text
• providing each audio with ‘page’ to promote and link to

Given those capabilities, what repurposing opportunities do we have?

Repurposing opportunities with Racket

What can we repurpose?

• The transcript
• The mp3

How can we repurpose? Copy the Transcript and

• use it as the basis for a blog post
• use it as a social media post, instagram, facebook, linkedin, etc.
• use it as a twitter thread or tweetstorm

What could we do with the mp3?

• Download the audio and convert it into an Audiogram video for other social sites e.g using getaudiogram.com, or edit into a video using invideo, wave.video or other video creation tool
• Combine a bunch of the mp3s into a longer form podcast?
• Combine a bunhc of related mp3s into a longer youtube video?

We have opportunities to repurpose and drive more traffic to the Racket post and try to build up a following on Racket by linking the posts to the Racket post.

Or we could use racket as base content which we syndicate to our other platforms to grow our blog traffic, or presence on other platforms.

Racket Repurposing Steps

Prior to doing any repurposing for racket do the following:

• wait until the automated transcript has been created
• edit the automated transcript “Edit my Racket” then save changes
• Download the .mp3
  • view source on the racket page,
  • search for .mp3,
  • open the mp3 in a new window,
  • right click and save the file
• custom thumb?
  • if you added a custom thumbnail image to the racket then you can download it
  • “Edit my Racket” right click on the thumb and download the image

This is within the terms of conditions on the racket site:

“You retain your rights to all User Content you create on the service, and may download, share, post, reuse, and publish the content you create and publish on the service. We retain a license to your User Content content to be able to publish it on the service, allow others to listen to the content you publish, and enable other features to remix, reply to, and share content.”

• https://racket.com/c/terms

At this point you have everything you need to repurpose

Examples

Racket to Audiogram

I downloaded the .mp3 to my computer, then uploaded it to getaudiogram, picked a segment of audio, then pasted in the text from the racket transcript to create and audiogram very quickly.

I released it to Facebook, Linkedin and Instagram with links back to my racket profile.

• https://www.instagram.com/p/CP_02R2IKtW/

Racket to Patreon

I used the transcript as a basis for a very extended Patreon post on the topic.

This is essentially the blogging strategy but the text was behind the Patreon paywall, rather than a blog.

I didn’t mention the Racket in the Patreon post.

• https://www.patreon.com/posts/52370405

Racket to Blog

I used the transcript as a basis for a slightly extended blog post on the topic.

I copied the transcript into the blog and added some additional thoughts to round it off and make the blog post have a little more content. I linked to the Racket post to help grow the profile there, but the post could have stood on its own.

• https://www.eviltester.com/blog/eviltester/rackets/202106/qa-is-a-process/

I fully expect that, at a minimum I will create a blog post from each Racket, with additional information.

Why so much repurposing?

• Racket is still a very new site, it may not succeed.
• Racket does not support embedding of content.
• Racket is ‘closed’, it encourages posting links back to Racket, but racket is not SEO optimised for each post.

Why try racket?

• Easier to get started with than podcasting
• Small number of users, easier to make a splash
• Easy to repurpose small audio files
• Free auto transcripts for repurposing and re-use
• Own your social handle on every platform

Racket has gamification in the form of ‘scoreboards’ and leaderboards, so it is easy to sucked into creating content to rise up the leaderboards. If you concentrate on using it strategically as part of your content strategy then I think it makes an interesting new addition. Particularly if you haven’t tried audio content before.