How Podcasters Can Leverage Social Media to Get More Listeners

Looking to expand your podcast reach? Join the club! Podcasts have enjoyed a well earned surge in popularity recently, and I’m loving all the new faces (er, digital faces) joining the podcast world.

If you’re a podcaster, first of all, go you! And second, a savvy social media presence is one of the best tools out there to grow your brand.

Did you know that 36% of listeners discover new podcasts through social media? That’s a pretty insane percentage considering all the ways we get our media referrals these days, and it means that it definitely pays to leverage social to promote your work.

Before we get into it, I want to mention a free downloadable resource I have to accompany this post! Check out my free roadmap for social media and podcasts, which you can download here. It’ll give you an on-the-go PDF that you can reference.

Optimize your social media profiles

Your first task is to make sure that your own profile isn’t limiting your reach. Do you have a great picture or artwork to represent your show? Do you have a branded cover photo on Facebook? Are you layering text to make custom graphics? Your profile should enhance your message, not distract from it.

In addition to appearance, your bio on your social profiles should be doing some heavy lifting.

A lot of podcast social media pages leave out a key detail: they don’t mention podcasting! Your bio should explain your medium, what the show is about, and what people can expect from you. I especially appreciate it when podcasts tell me their specific angle — what makes your show unique?

The other really important thing is to have a clear call to action. When people land on your profile, what do you want them to do? Subscribe? Check out your website? Whatever it is, be sure it’s stated plainly on your page so that your listeners have a clear next step after they follow you.

Consistently share new episodes

Podcasters are great about promoting a new episode on social media, but they often fall flat in the follow up. You should be promoting new episodes multiple times after the first “we made a new episode” announcement. Obviously, you’re not going to post the exact same “listen to this episode!” message each time, so get creative. I recommend making two or three follow up posts using a variety of styles. And to make this super easy for myself, I use a scheduling tool like Social Report to so that all my posts go out at optimized times.

Here are a few different ways you can promote the same episode: Grab a pull quote and create a Canva graphic of it. Write a micro-article and share it on social with an invitation to learn more about the topic in your latest episode. Have a question of the day or a fun fact that relates to what you talked about, and add a link back.

I also love audiograms; they’re a visual wavelength representation of your podcast, and they’re super easy to make in Headliner (free) or Wavve (paid). Any way you can give your audience a sample or teaser of the most recent episode is great, and audiograms just look cool.

And don’t forget that you have an entire archive of past episodes that need love too.

Realistically, most people won’t listen to every single episode, so share some oldies-but-goodies from time to time. Archived episodes keep new listeners in touch with more of your content and remind long time listeners what they signed up for. The #ThrowbackThursday is a great tag for this.

Expand your audience

In reality, crafting posts is a small percentage of the work you have to do on social. Your main focus should be on reaching with new audiences rather just posting content for the followers you already have.

Remember that only a very small percent of followers will consistently listen to your podcast, so it’s better to focus on growing that audience and attracting more people to your tribe.

Doing this requires you to meet new people the way you’d meet them in real life: find out where they congregate and become part of the community. For example, if your podcast is about podcasting, look for a Facebook group for active podcasters.

Look at relevant brands and see who they interact with. If you’re a yoga podcaster, for example, check out other yogis or yoga clothes brands and see what they’re doing. And of course, check out the hashtags and try to find people you can connect with that way.

Keep in mind that this is an outline of what’s possible with promoting your podcast on social media. It’s a simple outline of what I’ve found to work with my clients and with my own podcast.

If you follow the guidelines I’ve set, you’re well on your way to getting more podcast listeners using social media.

Originally published at jaylynpace.com.