When you’re starting a podcast you don’t want it to be something that you alone or your grandmother alone listen to.
You want an audience for your podcasts.
Social media is one of the best ways to market your podcasts because podcasting inherently is highly social. Social media users are avid podcast listeners as well.
Turns out 64% of monthly podcast listeners also tune in to social media several times during a day.
Social media is crowded though and that means you need to be highly strategic in your social media use when marketing and promoting podcasts.
Here are a few tips to help you grow your podcasting community with social media:
Use the right platform
There are dime a dozen social media platforms coming up almost on a daily basis. So what’s the right platform. The right platform is one that your audience uses and is online on.
Consider all of these factors when choosing a social media channel. The topic of podcast, People you speak, if they are young or not. Youngsters tend to use facebook and Instagram the most.
If you have zero clue where your audience keeps hanging out ask them on where they hang out and what happens to be their favorite social media channel.
Your audience might be on several platforms but the thing is you want to be marketing on the platform where they’re most active on. You want to post social media updates on channels where your audience is most likely to see those.
Focus on one or two platforms at most.
Use hashtags
Hashtags are the traffic currency on social media channels. Want to promote your podcasts on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook?
Use hashtags.
Hashtags are basically keywords that help you propel your post to top rankings. They help you reach the top for relevant and specific terms.
Hashtags should aptly describe the content of your podcast. A branded hashtag is one of the best things you can do for your business as it becomes a good branding tool.
With your podcast ask audiences if you want to use the hashtag and see how effective it turns out to be.
Create images with pull quotes
Social media is a highly visual platform. There’s no way you can generate traction for a medium that’s purely audio. Tweets with images get tweeted more and generate much higher engagement.
Even though podcasts as a medium are fully audio you can use visual marketing to drive traffic and leads.
How to do this?
With pull quotes.
It’s an easy way to pull quotes from episodes and create quote-based images that should help generate curiosity around the podcast. Such quotes are always easy to find if you’re hosting guests or are putting well-researched content out there.
Use free design tools like canva to add such images.
- Use sound bites
As a podcaster the audio content is beneficial to people. It should be highly engaging. You cannot simply create any kind of content.
Include highly engaging content.
Social platforms have no place for mp3 files. Hoever it’s easy to convert those audio files to video with the help of tools like Wavve.
Wavve is the one software you need to create video content with the help of images and add the mp3 file in the background.
- Use social media to build your community
Social media is not just a channel to post your content and pray for clicks. A social media platform can double up as an engagement platform to generate clicks and views for your content.
YOu want to engage people and make them feel connected to you as a whole and not just the podcast.
AN easy way to do this is share aspects of your life on social media. Infuse personality into your posts. People listen to you because they like you. Let your personality shine through.
Use social media to connect with influencers
If you want popular guests to show up and pay attention start by tagging them on social media channels.
You can’t really go the full circle of spamming them every chance you get but can definitely use the opportunity to build a long-lasting connection that transcends boundaries.
- Promote your old episodes
Social media is so convoluted that your old posts can quickly lose their way. It’s better to promote evergreen content. It’s content that’s relevant and highly valuable to your audiences and gets shared and attracts more and more traffic since the time you originally publish it.
Social media is crowded and even being a popular figure your audiences can always lose track of each and every episode you published. That’s where resharing content gives them additional opportunities to connect with you.
- Create a schedule
The best way to generate excitement about your podcast is by posting on a schedule. Stay on top of the schedule and always create content that people can follow and like.