A sound experiment
How video clips from our podcasts (huh? yes, really) help us find new listeners
Sometimes it seems podcasts and social media have a love-hate relationship. Social platforms allow podcast-makers and listeners to find each other and strike up a conversation. Listeners can even talk directly with their favourite hosts, or get a glimpse of the behind-the-scenes process. And yet most podcast consumption happens in podcast apps, not social media. Good old-fashioned RSS, not tweets, is still the main way listeners receive new episodes.
But although we’re not interested in trying to made audio go “viral”, as my colleague Adam has written, we wanted to figure out how to use Facebook — where we have the most followers and generate the most engagements on our posts — to talk about our podcasts. The Facebook algorithm tends to punish promotional posts, and it’s silly to share entire podcasts on a platform where most people aren’t prepared to listen to 10-15 minutes of audio.
Video on Facebook is a different story, however. Last month Nicola Mendelsohn, Facebook’s vice president for EMEA, said she would bet on Facebook becoming “all video over the next five years”. Video already performs well on Facebook, but it’s hard to know how much of that is down to user demand and how much is due to an inflated algorithmic preference for video. Whether or not video is the next big thing, it’s working for now. We decided to take advantage of this by making short clips of our podcasts in combination with a still image and a compelling quote. These are posted to Facebook as videos (we call them audiograms) and we’ve been encouraged by how they fly. Here are a few things that have worked well — and not so well.
The “easy”(ish) wins
Nothing in life is certain but death and taxes, and this is especially true on social media, where the rules change all the time. But if there’s one thing that verges on a safe bet it’s “Game of Thrones”. Our other social posts promoting articles on the economics and politics of Westeros have been among our most popular of the year, and our audiogram for a podcast on the topic also performed above average for a social post.
Donald Trump has saturated news feeds for the past year, but a strong quote and image was still a victory for us.
The pig that failed to fly
Of the 16 audiograms we’ve tried so far, only one has performed worse than a median post — this, from our science podcast.* Our average audiogram has 10 times as many views as this one about a robot surgeon. Perhaps the picture and quote didn’t work well enough together; perhaps the copy didn’t sell the podcast; perhaps people didn’t want to get stuck into this issue on that particular day; perhaps we should only make podcasts when the topic or the speaker is a famous person. I’d love to know what you think.
* No pigs were harmed in the making of this audiogram
The pleasant surprises
The first set of audiograms we tried tended to feature big events or big names, such as the American election and Andrew Lloyd Webber, the composer. It was encouraging to see that they held up when we tried some of our “Money Talks” podcasts. Maybe it’s no surprise; though we cover a huge range of topics, people do like The Economist’s take on economics now and then, after all.
The most successful post
Our most popular audiogram by all three of the measures we’ve been tracking for audiograms — reach (how many people see the post), engagement (how many people comment on, like or share it) and plays — was an interview with our editor Zanny Minton Beddoes. When I listened to the podcast for the first time I felt our editor had become a kind of audiogram Father Christmas. She’d given us the perfect one-minute clip which clearly and thoroughly laid out The Economist’s stance on Brexit. Given that our social feeds had been so filled with Brexit articles, this audiogram gave our followers something a little different: the opportunity to stop and listen to our elevator pitch on why we supported Remain, without having to leave Facebook.
I suspect that one thing making an audiogram successful is when the image and the quote work well alone — without the sound. A user may share the post based on the image and quote without even having heard the clip. That is clearly possible with the audiograms on Trump, “Game of Thrones”, and Zanny’s comments on Brexit. Do you think that might be the case?
Now we’ve got some early signs, it will be interesting to see how we can develop this concept further. Is there anything you particularly like or dislike about our audiograms? How are other publishers doing them better? Do you think we should indicate that these videos require sound, eg with a little 🎧 logo?
Let us know.
Jenni Reid is a social media writer at The Economist.
