Should I update my Alexa Flash Briefing daily or weekly?

February 12, 2019

This is one of the first and most common questions we receive when someone joins SoundUp Now. Unfortunately, there isn’t an easy answer. Let’s start by talking about how the Alexa Flash Briefing daily or weekly frequency works in the first place.

Flash Briefing Upload Frequencies

When you’re first setting up your Alexa Flash Briefing, Amazon wants to know what your new episode frequency is going to be. They give you 3 options on how long your audio file will stay live:

Hourly
Daily
Weekly

I don’t know anyone that has the time to do hourly content so we are just going to skim by that one as if it’s not even there…

Alexa Flash Briefing Daily Uploads

So what happens if you select daily? If you publish your episode at 9am on Monday morning, Amazon will play that audio file for 24 hours until 9am on Tuesday morning. If you do not have a Tuesday episode and do not upload, users will receive the message

“________ does not contain any recent content”

and then move on to the next Flash Briefing they are subscribed to.

In MY opinion (Sean), I think this is the best thing you can do IF you have nothing relevant for Tuesday or would just repeat Monday’s episode. This way, it moves on and continues playing the other Flash Briefings I’m subscribed to. I DO NOT like listening to the same episode of a 2-10 minute briefing from the day before… unless it’s meant to be that way… which leads me to…

Alexa Flash Briefing Weekly Uploads

If you’ve selected Weekly Uploads and upload your audio file on Monday at 9am, this episode will play until one of two things happens:

1. It expires in 7 days the next Monday at 9am.

2. You upload a new episode before the 7 days is expired. (You can still upload daily and Alexa will just play the most recent episode published.)

Yes, that means you can upload a new episode everyday just like the daily settings BUT the difference here is that if you DO NOT upload a new one on Tuesday, everyone will just hear Monday’s episode again… which can be repetitive in a bad way.

For Example, let’s say your flash briefing is about news and/or updates in a particular industry. So if you’re talking about Facebook news on Monday… do you think anyone wants to hear the same news about the same thing for 7 days? No… and they will disable your briefing… maybe that’s drastic but I would be very annoyed. Now I know what you’re thinking “Sean, they can just say: Alexa, next”, but do you really want people to be in the habit of skipping your content? What if they aren’t able to do so and just get frustrated? Here’s a quote from Jen Lehner Media of The Front Row Entrepreneur Flash Briefing

“I feel really strongly that if you want to grow your audience, it’s important to publish new content every day, or at the least Monday through Friday. You don’t have to record every day, but I do think it’s important PUBLISH every day.” – Jen Lehner

Now on the flip side of that, maybe you teach Spanish and want to focus on a “Word of the Week”? In this case you do want to be repetitive as that’s the best way to learn. Other examples could be exercises, vocal warmups, memory tests and so on. But I DO NOT want to hear your rant about Facebook privacy settings for 5 minutes for 7 days straight…

In conclusion, many believe having new, daily content is the best here. Having your Alexa frequency set on weekly will ensure you never go without content but you must be aware of how others will listen to said content. This isn’t the same as a podcast where they pick and choose when and what they listen to… they subscribed to you to hear something in a flash and brief… so don’t waste their time, and get to the point… but that’s another post for another day.

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Sean McKenna

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