Invite Your Podcast Audience to Galas, Build Community Through Conversation
Audience feedback is the Holy Grail of podcasting. Not only does it boost your morale, but also it helps you shape future episodes and improve your show. Unfortunately, it can be hard for podcasters to achieve. Social media is crowded and governed by algorithms. Reviews are great but hard to get, and platforms like Apple Podcasts don’t even notify podcasters when they get one.
For podcasters to get direct feedback from their audience, they have to make it as simple as possible. Fortunately, Galas is a system you can use to make it easy for your audience to communicate with you about your content.
What if podcast audiences could comment directly on an episode? Most podcast listening apps aren’t there yet. But what if your audience could click on a link in your episode’s show notes and go to a page where they could comment with text or a voice recording?
Now they can.
Start a Conversation
Setup is as easy as PodPage or claiming your podcast on Podchaser. Create a login, search for your podcast, and verify that you own the RSS feed. Galas displays a page with a section for each episode.
Sharing Galas Episode Links
Galas generates a link at the top of your page, so you can easily share it in the next podcast episode’s show notes. You don’t have to generate that link in advance, though. Each episode has a shareable link.
Pricing
Galas is free because it’s still in a growth phase. Yes, all podcast software is, but in Galas’ case, it’s still very new. Their FAQ says, “We do not yet have plans for making it payable, but even if we do, all the features you get for free will stay free for you forever. So, it’s better to register and get it for free.” They call this a “minimum viable product” and plan to add more features in the future.
Pros and Cons
Galas costs nothing, and it’s easy to use. It helps your audience get in touch with you. What’s not to love?
They also have a podcast cover art creation service that’s free for the first 100 people to apply, a Reddit discussion community, and a guide for creating a podcast. When you join, the company makes a point of getting in touch with you to ask how it’s working for you and what questions you have.
As of this writing, you can only use it for one podcast per login. There’s no explanation of how to delete comments if you get a troll. If you need help, the knowledge base or support articles are an email address and a Galas subreddit for discussion.
Should You Use Galas To Engage Your Audience?
Like most tools, it depends on how podcasters and audiences use it. Since it’s free, it’s worth trying. You have to be proactive with it: actively copy and paste the links into your show notes, blog posts, social media, and so on. There isn’t a way to automate it. It’s one more login for your audience to make. But, there are fewer points of friction than social media. Your audience won’t be distracted by something else while they’re using it. YouTube has comments directly below its player window, making it the preferred choice for many podcast enthusiasts. With Galas, podcasters are much closer to combining their engagement with their content.
