Is social media essential if you want to grow your podcast?
As someone who finds social media an exhausting part of life in general, I wish I could say it’s possible to grow a podcast without it.
But, unless you’ve got an existing audience you can mobilise through an email list, live events or a community, social media is going to be an essential part of your plan to grow your show.
Even if you have all those things, at a certain point you’re going to reach a limit on the amount of new people you can get your content in front of.
And if getting more eyes (and ears) on your your podcast is your goal (which it usually is) it’s pretty hard to do that without social media.
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Does that mean you need to be on every social media platform for your podcast?
Absolutely not.
In fact, I’d strongly encourage you not to do that.
The more channels you’re on the more content you need and the more time you’ll have to spend scheduling and engaging with those social audiences.
Yes, you can use the same content for multiple platforms but some require higher posting frequencies which means…more content.
Scheduling is also a part of the process that takes a lot more time than you’d think and the more platforms you’ve got to schedule content to, the more time that’s going to eat up in your week.
Engagement has also become one of the most important metrics, which means, if you want your content to turn up in more people’s feeds you have to be engaging with the people who are engaging with your content.
And that takes time.
So how do you know what social media platforms to focus on for your podcast?
Ideally you want to do some research to determine where your ideal listeners are.
If you can’t determine that, I’d advise experimenting with trackable links so you can see which platforms are converting people to listeners.
There are a bunch of tools out there like Podder, that allow you to create trackable links that can tell you whether someone has clicked on your content and then, listened to your show.
If you’re spending time sharing content to a social platform where no one is listening (even if they’re clicking your links) that data can help you decide whether it’s worth continuing or whether you should concentrate your efforts somewhere else.
Can you track everyone who’s listening from social?
While trackable links are GREAT and a game changer in terms of podcast promotion they’re not a perfect science.
It’s great to get data on who’s clicking and listening to your podcast but some people will see your content and won’t click the link because they’ll search for your show in their podcast app.
Or they’ll see your content 150 times before they remember “Oh yeah, I’ve been meaning to listen to that podcast” and those are the people you can’t track.
That doesn’t mean the data you’re getting from trackable links isn’t useful, it’s brilliant when it comes to helping you focus your attention, but it’s important to note it won’t catch everyone.
Think of social media as an awareness tool for your podcast
Even if people aren’t clicking on your podcast links, I’d argue building awareness on social media is one of the most important things.
Having your show and content out there, even if people only consume your video snippets, is still a good thing.
You want your podcast to have visibility because audience growth is incremental so it might take someone seeing your content multiple times before they convert to a listener (if they do at all).
To make sure people think of your show when they’re looking for something new to listen to, you have to be top of mind.
And that means… in their faces on social media.
Do you need to start up a new social media account for your podcast?
Not unless you have to!
In some instances your personal account isn’t going to suit your podcast content.
In that case it’ll make sense to start up a new feed so you don’t annoy people who’ve followed your personal account with stuff they don’t want.
You can also get away with posting WAY more frequently about your podcast on a dedicated profile rather than a profile that’s about you generally.
The thing to remember when you’re starting any new social media account is you’re starting your audience from zero.
That means you have to build up that profile with content. And the more content the better.
You can also utilise hashtags and of course use your personal page to point people to your podcast page, but it’s no guarantee people will come across.
Hopefully, if your content is resonating, getting engagement and getting fed to new audiences, your social page and podcast will grow over time.
The bottom line…
If you want to grow your podcast audience, you need to be constantly bringing people into new episodes and old episodes, and you’ve got no idea what piece of content is going to pique their interest.
That means the more varied content you can have out there, the better.
And the more places people can see it, the greater the chance of them checking it out.
To get your podcast in front of people who might become listeners you need to be where they are, and most people, are on some form of social media.
So if you were looking for a reason to avoid social media, I’m afraid this isn’t the article for you (even though you’ve made it to the end…sorry about that).
You don’t have to be everywhere, but if growing audience is your goal then you are going to need some presence for your podcast on social media.
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Hello. Welcome to the show.
Today I'm answering a question from Alan, who has asked, is it essential that you have social media accounts when you have a podcast?
And I would say, as a general rule, you do need some social presence if you want to grow your audience.
Unfortunately, unless you have an existing email list or some kind of community, or you're doing live events and you're in front of a lot of people, social media is really the thing we're stuck with if we want to grow our audience. And if you want to get in front of people who don't know you, it can be a really good tool to use.
I would say you do not need to be on every single platform.
And I'm currently doing a bit of an experiment with my podcast, Me and My Tiny Human, on a whole bunch of different social platforms, because the goal of that experiment is to find out which ones I can delete, because I don't want to be having to post everywhere. And you don't need to be posting everywhere.
If you can, and it's easy for you to repurpose content and put it in multiple different places, it's no harm to do that. And the more places you are, the more places you will be found.
But ultimately, if you are time-poor, if you are doing this on top of your job, if you are trying to really slim down the process, then you want to be focusing on the platforms that are getting most bang for buck for you.
And to do that, you really want to test out by sharing content on those platforms and ideally have a link that will track the content to see if people are clicking through and they're actually listening to your episode.
There are a bunch of tools out there that you can use that will allow you to put a little bit of script on your RSS feed so that, if a link gets clicked when you share on your socials, they'll be able to tell if this person is actually pressing play on this episode.
Then you need to look at that data and go, well, I'm sharing a whole heap to LinkedIn or Pinterest or whatever, and nobody's clicking a darn thing.
So is there any point in me sending it out to that?
Now, people might be seeing your content. This is the difficult thing with social media and podcasting. People might be seeing your content and they just might not be clicking on it. But they might then go to their podcast app and find you, or they might come and find you later on and think, “Oh, I've seen that show so many times that I really want to check it out.”
So there is a bit of an air gap in terms of knowledge about understanding what exactly are people doing. Are they coming and seeing me on social media and then thinking, “I don't want to listen”? Or are they just putting it in their to-do list for later?
And I can't really tell because they haven't clicked on anything.
So there is something to be said for that awareness on social media. Just sending your stuff out there so that people become aware of your content, you, and your show.
But ideally, you just want to be focused on the platforms that are having the most impact for you.
That might take a little bit of research in terms of working out where are the people that I am talking to hanging out. Are they Facebook users? Are they Instagram users? Are they on TikTok?
You really need to understand and do some work on your ideal listener to work out where they are most likely to be, and that's where you should focus.
I think one of the things about social media platforms that sometimes trips people up is whether you need to start a brand new account for your show.
Now, in some instances, your personal account is not going to suit your podcast account, and so it will make sense to start up something new.
The thing to know about that is you're starting something from scratch. So you have to build that baby up from zero, which means you've got to put content on it. And the more content, the better.
You don't want to flood the feed, depending on which platform you're using, but on Facebook you can post and get away with fewer posts than you can on TikTok or Twitter (or X, or whatever we're calling it now).
So you will need to have content to create to build that platform up, because it's not going to grow if you don't have any content on there.
But you can also utilise things like hashtags, which can help your content appear in front of people who might not necessarily be following you but are searching for content in your niche.
The decision to start up something independently really depends on what you are doing and what the content is on your personal social.
And if you've built up a following on your personal social, well, it might be a good idea to utilise that.
But if you've also got a bunch of people who are following you there for something that is totally different to your podcast idea, then that might end up irritating them more than if you just started up something new and thought, “Okay, well, I'm just going to have to post content on this and build it up.”
But either way, ideally, if your goal is to grow your audience, and that is what most podcasters want to do, you are going to have to find ways to get multiple pieces of content out of each episode and share those on social media.
If you are doing video, you can cut up different videos of the full episode into little bite-sized pieces.
I think that is a much better use of your time than trying to upload a full edited video to something like YouTube. Getting little pieces that entice people to listen to the full episode on their podcast app is a much more interesting way to engage people than just an audiogram or something that's static.
So video can work really well in that regard. You just really need to think about how many different ways you can point people to this specific episode.
And then you need to keep pointing people to past episodes.
Some of them might date if your content is topical, but ideally you don't just want to say, “Hey, my episode’s out now,” and that's the only bit of promotion you do about that episode. And then you move on to the next one the next week.
If you want to grow your audience, you need to be constantly bringing people into new episodes and old episodes. And you don't know what piece of content is going to pique their interest.
So the more varied content you can have out there, the better.
And ideally, something makes them go, “Oh, now I'm really keen to listen to that.” And they might have seen a hundred pieces of content before they actually press play. This is the punish of promotion for podcasting.
But it's really important to get that stuff out there. And to do that, you do need social media pages.
But you don't necessarily need to create individual social media pages for your podcast if you have existing social media, and it would work on those platforms.
Ultimately, consolidating and making this simpler, rather than trying to have every single platform and every… I mean, it just gives me a headache thinking about it.
Less is more.
You want to do fewer things really well, rather than trying to be on every single platform and trying to deliver the kind of content that the algorithm needs, because the algorithm is hungry and it's exhausting sometimes.
So hopefully that has helped. If you have a question, please submit it via the link in the description of this episode.
If you want any more help with your podcast, please head to podschool.com.au. You can check out my online podcasting course there, and I will see you next week.
