Podcasting Q&A

How to Promote Your Podcast on Social Media

• Buzzsprout

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In Part 10 of our Podcast Marketing Series, you'll learn how to use social media as an effective podcast marketing strategy (and the beginner mistakes you should absolutely avoid!).

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Travis:

In today's episode, you'll learn how to use social media to grow your podcast audience. Welcome to Podcasting Q&A, revealing the best tips and strategies to launch grow and monetize your show. Now, when it comes to podcast, marketing and promotion strategies, social media is one of the more common ones that you will hear, taught and explained and encouraged saying that if you just post about your episodes on Facebook, or Instagram or Twitter, magically, people will flock to your show, and you will get more listeners in practice. It's a lot different than that. In fact, a lot of the advice that you will find on the internet about how to use social media to grow your podcast doesn't work. So in this video, we're going to demystify social media and tell you exactly how to use it to get more podcast listeners. Now, the first thing that you'll need to decide if you want to use social media as a marketing lever for your podcast is which platform you want to focus on. There are the big three, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. Those are the ones that most people are familiar with, that a lot of people use, and are pretty common when it comes to podcasts and podcast hosts creating public profiles that people can interact with and where they can share about their podcast. But don't discount the more niche social media platforms like LinkedIn, like Pinterest, like Tick tock, even and clubhouse, all those platforms can work depending on your audience. And so when it comes to choosing the best social media platform for you, there's two questions you need to answer. The first one is where do your listeners like to hang out on line. So if you have a podcast about podcasting, clubhouse might actually be a really great platform for you. Because it's audio centric. But if you have a podcast that's more focused on homeschooling, then Pinterest and Instagram might be better fits than say, Twitter or Facebook, you want to think about your ideal listener, the person that loves your show more than anything else. And what is the social media app that they like to use? Where do they like to hang out? That's the first question. The second question is, which social media platform do you actually like to use, because if you don't enjoy Twitter, you don't enjoy posting your thoughts 10 times a day reading through threads catching up on hashtags, then it doesn't matter if it's a good strategy, it won't be a good strategy for you because you're not likely to stick with it long enough to really see the results that you are looking for. Now, once you've chosen the social media platform that you want to use to promote your podcast, the biggest mistake that you need to avoid is treating it like a billboard people are not going to be interested in following you online if all you're doing is spamming them with messages about new episodes. Instead, I want to shift your thinking. Social media is not simply a place where you blast out with a megaphone every time you publish an episode. Instead, you are creating a tiny little online community of like minded people that enjoy the same things. One really good example of this is the major league venting podcast. They cover equestrian events, and they created a Facebook group for the people that are also interested in Major League events in their Facebook group has more than 6000 members in it. And that has had a direct impact on their podcasts growth. Now, when you do get around to telling people about new episodes that come out what is the best way to do that? Well, ultimately, it comes back to the social media platform that you chose. But most platforms will allow you to share an image or a video in addition to any kind of text that you want to put in the post. And we've seen that videos, specifically, visual soundbite style videos really performed well on social media and allows you to share a clip from your episode, something really juicy, something really intriguing that it's going to grab someone's attention and make them want to listen to the entire episode. That's something that you can create really easily inside of Buzzsprout. You just go to the episode that you want to promote. Create a visual soundbite, choose the clip that you want to share and then you can customize the artwork and the audio waveform that you can then upload to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest for every year promoting your show. You can also use the Canva integration that we've built right into the visual soundbite editor to customize the artwork, so you can tailor it to your branding and the colors that you use for your podcast. But if you don't host your show on Buzzsprout that's cool too. You can also use platforms like WAV and headliner that will allow you to build similar style visual sound bites or audio Gramps. Now, how do you actually track your progress? How do you know that after choosing a social media platform, investing time into building community and sharing tastefully your podcast episodes with that audience? How do you know that it's working? So a couple things that you can do, you can track the interactions on the social media app to see who is actually engaging with the content and providing feedback that indicates that they are actually listening to the podcast episodes. The other thing you can do is track how many downloads each podcast episode is getting and comparing that to before you started using social media as a podcast marketing tool after a few months, reassess and decide is social media the right marketing lever for your podcast? Or should you try something else? Thanks for listening to Podcasting Q&A. If you have a question you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can just go to speakpipe.com/Buzzsprout or clic the link in the show notes t leave us a brief audio message Podcasting Q&A is availab e both as a video and an audio p dcast. So if you enjoy watchin videos, make sure you subscri e to the Buzzsprout YouTube channel to get more content every single week. Or you can subscribe to Podcasting Q&A and your favorite podcast listeni g app. Well that's it for tod y. Thanks for listening. And as lways, keep podcasting