What’s the reason behind the popularity of podcasts.
With just a few hundred dollars in startup costs you can get started with a lucrative business that gets you before hundreds of people. You need a core topic, and a noise cancelling mic.
Well that’s about it. If you get enough listeners on board there’s no stopping you.
Podcasts aren’t time consuming either where you have to pen an entire post from scratch.
Podcasting is only growing and that means there’s a lot of space for niches and marketing yourselves and gaining a spot.
Before it gets crowded, start hustling towards success. You can audio blog about anything that captures your interest.
As long as there’s an audience for it you will be successful.
To get people interested into your podcast and develop a following you can count on, you need a little more than good content. Or passion.
There are several ways to market a podcast but one big and grand is with social media. This is what I will be discussing today.
Podcast listeners are great users of social media as well as almost 64% podcast listeners check their social media feed several times a day in a bid to understand what’s going on with the world. And stay updated.
Similar to podcasting social media is much more crowded. You have to be smart with the way you use social media to reach people.
And promote your podcast.
Here are useful social media strategies for you to use as a podcast host.
Go to the right platforms
When it comes to social media channels, you’re spoilt for choice. There are many options. Even with the dazzling array and shiny buttons, only a few are apt for you.
Let’s see which ones are perfect.
If you have to zero down on something get this. The social media channel most right for you is the one your audience is alive on.
Consider who and where your audience is and how do they use social media channels.
Also consider few other things like the topic of your podcast and who is it speaking to. Consider the age of your audience, their demographics. Are they reliant on something like Instagram or Facebook? Are they a professional audience who eat LinkedIn for breakfast. Such and more questions will determine how to market to them.
Second, if you’re clueless on where to find them, just ask them. You can do so through your podcast itself. In the next episode conduct a few asking them to choose the social media network, they’re active on.
The audience is on several platforms. The key is to discovering the ONE they’re most active on. The single place they’re spending energy posting on and consider keeping themselves updated on.
This helps you create content and post to channels where they are most likely to see your posts. You won’t be wasting your time with pointless social media posts.
As you might discover your audience may be active on two channels instead of one. That’s not bad news. It gives you one more platform to focus on.
2. Use hashtags
Based on where you discover your audience to be hanging out on, there are a couple of platforms that are an absolute beast for hashtags. They live and breathe hashtags.
It’s true on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Snapchat. Just like regular keywords that you use to optimize your blog posts, hashtags are the face of keywords on social media. Done right, they help you reach a bigger audience and reach a specific audience in search for that hashtag.
There are many hashtags that describe the podcast content like #fashion or #food. You could also do well to include branded hashtag. As more and more people start seeing the particular hashtag, a community emerges as part of the larger goals.
Second, on your podcast episodes make it a regular spiel to talk about your hashtag. Ask people to share the hashtag and so on. Even if only a few people share it, it becomes a rallying point for people to mill around.
3. Create images from pull quotes
You can choose specific instances from your podcast episode to derive pull quotes that help you create visual imagery to generate much higher social media traffic. Tweets that sport images get 37% more engagement.
Podcast is audio. That’s not to say you can’t use visuals and rich imagery to do the talking for you and build your brand with visual media.
Pull quotes from episodes and create images based on these quotes. These are pretty easy to fashion with the help of free tools like Canva or Visme. You can also create infographics. Such quotes that offer a preview to the podcast episodes are good for creating curiosity and build your brand.
4. Go more than audio
Social media is a highly visual platform. To get the best out of it, you need to frame your podcasts in a manner that helps the other person visualize it as a benefit.
You have audio content that’s beneficial and engaging to the end user.
Despite how useful it is, you can’t just drop mp3 files to social media channels. They don’t allow it and even if they did, I doubt it would go anywhere.
But video. Video is super strong on social media. You can turn audio in exciting video with the help of animation. Animation lets you add branding and other elements to get the biggest benefits from doing so. And people get to listen to the highly engaging content you create.
There are tons of tools that help with this and convert simple audio files into animation. If you can’t be bothered hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you.
So these are my list of tips for generating the highest possible levels of engagement with social media. It takes a different approach but you can succeed with it.