Promoting Episodes with Visual Soundbites (Audiograms)

There are lots of ways to promote your podcast. Visual soundbites let you turn your audio into short video clips that are easy to share on social media. With Buzzsprout, you can quickly create simple, customizable clips without needing extra technical know-how.

If you have questions about using visual soundbites, email us at support@buzzsprout.com.

Keep podcasting!

Chapters

• 0:00 Why Visual Soundbites Work
• 2:05 Picking The Perfect Clip
• 3:40 Customizing Your Visual Soundbite
• 6:06 Save, Download, And Share

Transcript

Cara Pacetti: 0:00

Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, brought to you by the people at Buzzsprout. I'm your host, Cara Passetti, and I'm bringing you the best tips and strategies to keep you podcasting with confidence. Today we're tackling the question: how does a visual soundbite help me to promote my podcast? A visual soundbite is a feature that is specific to BuzzSprout, but I've also heard these short clips referred to as audiograms, amongst other podcast hosts. To briefly describe what a visual soundbite is, it's a short segment of your audio that we will help you turn into an engaging social video. Now, why are we taking an audio podcast and creating video clips from it? Well, let me explain. When it comes to promoting your podcast, we've found that video is much more engaging and really is the clear leader in social content. There was a study released in 2024 that was put out by Buzz Monitor, and the findings show that video formatted posts take the lead when it comes to social sharing. And the most popular platforms for video sharing are Instagram and TikTok. While video production can be very difficult and is really not for everybody, visual sound bites make it really easy for you to share your audio in a video format so that you can take full advantage of what we already know to be true about social media viewing. Now that we've gone through the why it's important to use a visual soundbite to promote your podcast, I want to walk through the steps of creating a visual soundbite inside of your Buzzsprout account. When you click create a soundbite inside of your Buzzsprout account, it will take you to a page that will allow you to preview your entire episode. There's a player there and you can listen to the whole thing. And while you're listening, you can decide which segment of your episode you want to use for that soundbite. The visual soundbite can be anywhere from 15 seconds at minimum up to 60 seconds. So since we are talking about choosing the best segment to use for your soundbite, what exactly should you include in a visual soundbite? Think of it like an engaging conversation. This is a short clip of your audio, so you want to find a segment that really motivates your listener to find your episode and keep listening to it. What is something that was said during that episode that you know will grab your audience's attention? You know them best. So make sure you make that clip very inviting and very engaging. Sometimes we will see podcasters use a visual soundbite as a teaser or a trailer for an upcoming episode. The cool part about this feature is that you can actually create visual sound bites when your episode is still in a draft mode inside of your Buzzsprout account. And so you would follow the same steps, even with your episode being unpublished, create the visual soundbite and then share that on your social media platforms, letting your listeners know what is to come. One way of making this visual soundbite super engaging is by including a clip of you and your guest. And so if this is a well-known guest and you have been promoting that this episode is upcoming and you are featuring this guest that you know your listeners will want to hear from, create a visual soundbite and include some of their commentary. Once your listeners hear the guest, of course, they are gonna run over and make sure that they're subscribed to your podcast so that when that episode goes live, they'll be there to hear it. Those are just some of the ways that you can use a visual soundbite to really engage your listeners and to promote your podcast. Once you've selected the segment that you want to use for your visual soundbite, the next step is to customize the image that you want shared. So the way visual sound bites work is that you will have one static image and then there will be waveforms playing in front of that image. Even though it defaults to your podcast artwork, you can select whatever image you would like added there. So once you've selected the artwork that you want to use for your visual soundbite, the next step is to select which size you want for the soundbite. The reason that we offer you a couple of different variations in sizing is because each social media platform presents their posts in different ways. For example, the square orientation that you'll see there, that's the standard for Facebook and Twitter. These sites typically use a square orientation or a square image. Then you'll see a landscape orientation. So this orientation is great for sites that optimize video. For example, YouTube or if you're sharing a video on, say, a website. And then the last option you'll see there is the portrait orientation. So the portrait orientation is like the landscape, but it's flipped up and down. And these are best for any story-like sharing platform. For example, Instagram or Facebook. They have an option for a post, but they now have the option for sharing reels or stories. And that's where that portrait orientation comes in handy. Also, TikTok and YouTube Shorts would be a great place for sharing the portrait orientation. So it's really up to you if you want to create and share different variations of your sound bites based on which platforms you're sharing on. You can absolutely do that. The other option you'll see on that page is to have artwork only, or you can have your text and your artwork showing. The artwork is the artwork that you select. It can be your podcast artwork or an image that you've uploaded that is specifically for this visual sound bite. And when you select artwork only, it's going to be the waveform just in front of the image. The other option is to include text and artwork. So you can customize the text and really add whatever you want, but we've prompted you to add your podcast name and your episode title. Those are all of your customization options for creating your visual soundbite. Once you've selected all of your options and you are confident and you're ready for this thing to go, all you have to do is save your work and we will automatically populate that right inside of your BuzzSprout account. You'll head back to your episode details page and you'll see an option to download the visual soundbite. If you're using our BuzzSprout app, you'll actually get a push notification. So love getting that notification that my visual soundbite is ready. And I can even head to my app and save that to my phone. Just keep in mind it's going to be an MP4 file, so a video file. From there, you can save the video file to your device and start sharing. I also recommend adding a link to your episode when you share those visual sound bites, either link to your Buzzsprout website, or you can even grab a URL from your Apple listing and share your episode that way. The main goal here is just to get your listener from your visual soundbite to your podcast listing. I hope after this episode, you are excited to start using visual sound bites to get the word out about your podcast. Our podcaster success team is always eager to help you with any questions. So if you have them, reach out to us at any time by emailing support at buzzsprout.com. If you have a question you'd like answered on a future podcasting Q&A episode, make sure to click the send us a text link in the show notes. Be sure to join us every Monday to kickstart your week. Thanks for listening. And as always, keep podcasting.