Podcast Marketing: How to Promote Your Podcast on Social Media
You’ve probably heard that “Content is king, but distribution is queen and she wears the pants.” We couldn’t agree more.
And as a smart podcaster like yourself, you’re not only amazing at creating audio gold, but you also know and appreciate the power of strategically sharing that content with your audience. That gold needs all the justice it deserves from our said queen — podcast distribution.
The way, frequency, and platforms of which you promote your episodes are super important. Let’s put it in perspective.
As of June 2018, Apple said that there are over 550,000 podcasts and over 18.5+ million episodes for people to choose from. That’s a pretty big sea of audio gold to choose from, so you want yours to stand out and get shared.
And you may be thinking … I share every single one of my podcast episodes as soon as it launches! That’s fantastic and we applaud you. But do you reshare it the following week on every platform in 4 different ways? And the week after that? And then grab old episodes and reshare those too? If you said yes, we just became best friends.
Here’s why it’s so important to promote your podcast on social media for more than just the first week it’s live: 90% of podcasts receive 90% of their lifetime downloads within 96 hours of posting. Eek. That’s not very long, so let’s dive in.
The Social Media Channels to Grow Your Show
There are 60+ social media sites, and thankfully you only need to be on a handful of them. Here are our favorites — and most proven — for podcasters:
- Instagram / Instagram Stories
- YouTube (Yes! Even if you’re an audio-only podcast, we’ll get to this later)
Then depending on your demographic, you can throw in LinkedIn as well — this is great for business/marketing podcasts. You have a few options for building your show’s presence on social.
- Use the host’s social channels to share the episodes
- Use the business’ social channels to share the episodes (what business is the podcast associated with?)
- Create social channels specifically for the podcast
They’re all great options, and this is the least of your concerns. Choose one and be consistent. And now … the fun part!
The Best-Performing Media To Share
You want as much strategic ammo as you can get when it comes to sharing your podcast. We like to share a minimum of 7 content pieces per episode. This includes:
- 2 Audiograms
- 3 Images Quotes
- 2 Optimized Thumbnails
Let’s break down each:
1. Audiograms
An audiogram is a static image that’s converted into a video by placing audio, a waveform, and transcriptions over it. This is for all of our audio-only podcasts. You should still create video assets for your episodes as they perform the best.
Headliner performed a study where they shared a podcast episode on Facebook 2 different ways. This was with a static image versus an audiogram, and the audiogram generated 5X the results and traffic. The static image generated 118 clicks and the audiogram generated 660. That’s a pretty significant difference. Wordstream then found that marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users. Turning sound bites of your episode into audiograms (video) gives you this ammo.
These should go on all 4 of the social media channels listed above (we’ll talk optimized sizing later).
2. Image Quotes
While video is a must, don’t neglect creative images that catch a viewer’s eye. We love image quotes, and so do audiences. These should do a few things:
- Increase brand awareness for your podcast
- Clearly express info about the episode
- Peek interest, evoke an emotion, or cause surprise
- Make people feel like if they don’t go listen to that episode … they’ll forever have FOMO
When creating your quote, consider including people. Neil Patel reported that images with people in them can lead up to a 95% increase in conversions.
3. Optimized Thumbnails
We suggest creating 2 optimized thumbnails per episode — one for YouTube and one for Facebook.
As mentioned earlier, each episode should have content uploaded to YouTube. Remember that audiogram you created? Perfect! Upload that bad boy to YouTube. That means you’ll want an optimized, branded, really cool thumbnail to go with it. Here’s an example:
You’ll also want one for Facebook. Remember that great stat from Headliner that the audiogram performed more than 5X better when shared on Facebook than a static image? If you want to put ad spend behind this, Facebook will most likely ixnay it because it has too much text. A great workaround is uploading an optimized thumbnail with much less text. Here’s an example:
Social Media Sharing Sizes
You want to make sure all of your assets are optimized for each social platform you post on.
When uploading to Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter feeds, we suggest using square for the audiograms, image quotes, and the Facebook thumbnail. Buffer found that square vs landscape led to 30–35% increase in views and 80–100% increase in engagement.
For Instagram Stories, it’ll need to be vertical. This means you’ll need a vertical audiogram.
For YouTube, it’ll be landscape. This also means you’ll need a landscape audiogram.
Let’s break down all the content here:
- Square audiogram (for social feeds)
- Vertical audiogram (for Stories)
- Landscape audiogram (for YouTube)
- Square image quotes
- Square thumbnail (for Facebook)
- Landscape thumbnail (for YouTube)
Here are the best social media image sizes:
- Square (Social media feeds): 1080px by 1080px
- Vertical (Stories): 1080px by 1920px
- Widescreen (YouTube): 1920px by 1080p
What’s The Best Way to Create This Content for Every Episode?
That’s quite a bit of distribution ammo for each episode. The best way to do this is by creating TEMPLATES. Our preferred tool for this is Photoshop. But anything that allows you to save templated designs that can be edited later will work. Canva is another great example.
This way, you can create templates for your audiograms, images quotes, and thumbnails. Then all you’ll have to change each week is the text, pictures if needed, etc.
Then once you have your promotion materials, it’s time to SHARE. And share often. Remember you don’t just want to promote an episode the week it goes live. Constantly cycle through episodes to breath life back into your older content. Then use social media scheduling to make your life 10X easier. You have a couple options here.
You can manually log into each platform and schedule each post. I.e. log into Facebook and craft your audiogram, then schedule it for later. Then do the same thing for twitter (learn how to schedule in Twitter).
If that doesn’t sound like your game, use a tool like Buffer to schedule away.
There you have it! The best channels, media, sizes, and how-to to promote your podcast episodes.
If this sounds like something you’d LOVE and see tons of value in … but don’t want to do, we get it. And that’s why we created Podcast Memes. We’ll create these 7+ assets for you — every week, every episode. Happy podcasting!
Shaina Weisinger is the founder and CEO of Podcast Memes, which turns podcasters’ episodes into micro marketing asset packages every week, giving them the tools to dominate their show’s marketing. Podcast Memes creates 7+ unique pieces of content per podcast episode. Shaina is on a mission to show content creators the untapped potential and repurposing power of the content they already have. Shaina loves to laugh loudly, be obnoxiously competitive on the volleyball court, treat her dogs as her kin, and recover from tripping on or running into almost everything within a five foot radius.
Originally published at www.buzzsprout.com.
