Your podcast series is gaining an audience – social media is an ideal way to help continue to capitalize on that and grow your podcast audience. Most people use one or two of the most popular social media platforms – Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn. The first step is to choose the right platform for your niche. For example:
- A podcast on art history should use visual platforms like Facebook and Instagram with plenty of space for discussion.
- For a podcast that talks about business or marketing, LinkedIn will work well.
- A podcast operating in a specialized niche such as biking might use BikerOrNot (a social platform for bikers).
Create Valuable Content
Every social media post provides an opportunity to engage with your fans. Your content needs to have value for them. Some ways to create value for your audience:
- Solve problems. People love content that helps make their lives easier.
- Leverage trends. Mention popular ideas or topics in the context of your niche. For example, an engineering podcast might share recent economic news and discuss how the economy affects innovation.
- Start discussions. Encourage people to contribute their thoughts. Reply to their comments and keep the conversation going.
- Run giveaways and contests. Posts involving people in this way tend to reach higher engagement levels. However, use giveaways sparingly – you don’t want to attract followers who are only looking for free stuff.
- Avoid controversial topics. Steer clear of politics or religion unless that’s what your podcast is all about.
Create a Social Media Content Calendar
A calendar helps you stay consistent. You might dedicate Mondays to sharing an inspirational quote and Wednesdays to a relevant news item. Maybe devote Tuesdays and Thursdays to asking questions to engage your fans. It’s also more productive to brainstorm lots of content ideas at once. Keep a folder with notes, links, images, and videos to use when the time comes to make a post. Use a tool like Buffer or Edgar to schedule batches of posts at least a week at a time or during a marketing campaign.
Engage With Your Audience
You have to chat with your audience. Like their comments, and share/retweet their content. If a person says something incredibly insightful, compose a discussion post around it and credit the originator. Host Twitter chats or Facebook Live sessions to answer your audience’s questions and respond to their comments. Invite your episode’s interview guest to join in.
Promote Your Podcast
Use your social media soapbox to announce your latest episode, recap old ones, and hype future shows with teasers. Post images with quotes from your show and audio snippets to pique your fans’ interest.
Optimize your hashtags to put yourself in front of people who are specifically looking for content like yours. Also, add hashtags to your profile’s bio. Do some research to find the best-related hashtags.
Most importantly, don’t just share once; share multiple times. Facebook and Instagram control a user’s feed via an algorithm that takes lots of variables into account, so you’ll want to try several times to get eyes on your content.
Here are a couple of helpful articles:
Look For Cross-Promotional Partners
Partner with other content creators with similar-sized fan bases to leverage their audiences. Find content creators (they don’t have to be other podcasters) whose audiences overlap with yours and ask them to share your content in exchange for sharing theirs.
Measure Your Results
Each social platform can provide advanced analytics to help you measure your level of engagement. If you use a social media platform that doesn’t have built-in analytics, keep a record of which posts received many likes and which were shared.
The Takeaway
Promoting your podcast on social media takes time and energy; there’s no shortcut. However, your reward will be an engaged community that eagerly awaits your new episodes and shares your content with their friends.