Keeping up with the podcast revolution
Our podcasts are evolving — and so is our social-media strategy for them
If, like me, you’ve ever tried to read the paper on the London Underground at rush hour you’ll know how awful it can be. Manoeuvering around someone you’re already standing uncomfortably close to isn’t always worth the effort to find a good reading angle. This is probably one thing that spurred the podcast revolution. Every morning, there is a whole world of information flowing through headphones under the streets of London, New York and other cities — and a lot less awkward jostling.
More and more people may be listening to podcasts, but the medium poses the challenge of being notoriously difficult to share on social media. My colleagues have written about this conundrum in the past: about how we use social media to create communities around our podcasts and how we use video to make audio clips more accessible.
But the world of social media does not stand still, so it’s time for an update to our tactics. This has been informed, in part, by new data from Apple. Its iTunes platform has given some producers, including The Economist, long-awaited information on the behaviour of their podcast subscribers. The results are eye-opening.
Every month, our audience spends a whopping 450,000 hours listening to Economist Radio, the home of all of our podcast strands — more than the total amount of reading time spent on all articles across all the paper’s digital platforms. Nearly three-quarters of listeners get all the way through to the end of each episode, which usually lasts around 15 minutes. This confirms what we could previously only assume: podcasts are an important part of the way people consume ideas and analysis from The Economist.
Our podcasts are good (full disclosure: I do work here), and the data show that audiences like them. This has emboldened us to devise new ways to find more listeners for them. Here are two ways we are tackling this challenge:
From A to V
Audio isn’t a medium that people tend to consume on social media; video is. So, we turn audio to video in a perky format we like to call “audiograms”.
Audiograms are videos that run for 40 to 90 seconds, with audio clipped from a podcast and an image laid over the top. Their main aim is to repurpose podcast content for Facebook and Twitter.
Though our first attempts were very successful, change is an inevitable part of the job when you work in social media. The latest generation of audiograms that I’ve helped to develop are more dynamic. We added typewriter-style text that not only shows what is being said (most viewers don’t have their sound on), but is also more enticing for someone scrolling through their feed.
We’ve reassessed the type of clips we use, too. One of the best qualities of Economist journalism is its depth and detail. That is true of podcasts as much as articles. When choosing a short clip, nuance can easily be lost. So we’re paying more attention to that than ever before. The best audiograms are ones that tell a simple, but interesting story, like this one we made on birds weaving cigarette butts into their nests. Other stories that do well are ones pegged to news, like this one we posted when Richard Thaler won the Nobel prize for economics.
Putting a face to a voice
Our Twitter account @economistradio is the main social hub for our podcast content. Here we can create a community, as well as sharing the great work our podcast team does.
The podcasts have a more personal and conversational tone than our print edition. Unlike the newspaper, we include individuals’ own voices — something that’s unavoidable in a podcast — and even reveal their names, which we don’t in print. So on our Twitter feed we can use a more colloquial tone and have conversations with our followers. It also provides a great opportunity for our followers to get to know our journalists (a rarity for a newspaper with no bylines).
One ear attached to a headphone, the other to the ground
Creating a social-media strategy around a podcast is a difficult challenge, but it’s a challenge we willingly accept. As the podcast revolution continues, The Economist will be right there with it.
Kaitlin Tosh is a social media writer for The Economist.
