107: Why You DON'T Need to Be on Every Social Media Platform

This episode of Growth the Show is sponsored by Riverside.fm, the leading platform to record studio quality podcasts from anywhere. More than 70,000 other podcasters use Riverside, including myself, GuyRaz, GaryVee, companies like Spotify, and even the New York Times. What's amazing about Riverside is that when you're recording a podcast or a remote interview, the recording quality is independent of Wi-Fi stability, which is huge. Your content is recorded locally, which ensures reliable and uncompressed content quality. It's basically a studio inside your browser, and it is super intuitive and easy to use. Once your recording is done, you'll automatically be able to download separate audio and video tracks and edit your content all with a few clicks. So if you haven't yet, give Riverside a try. Visit Riverside.fm and use my code Grow15, that's GROW15 to start recording studio quality sound and video and get 15% off a membership plan. This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, I am your podcast coach, and my mission is to help you, the independent podcaster, to get more listeners and make more money from your show. In this quick hit episode of Grow the Show, we are going to answer a question that I get a ton in coaching calls for the accelerator program in the free Grow the Show Facebook group in my Instagram DMs, even in the comments on my Facebook ads. So let's answer it today once and for all, and the question is this, should I be on every social media platform? Should I be repurposing my podcast content and putting it everywhere? Anywhere somebody is consuming anything. Now you can probably guess what my answer is going to be to that question, if you have ever heard me speak before. But before I answer, I must ask you, are you currently trying to get your podcast content repurposed and present on every social media platform? Or at least do you believe that you should be? It's a very, very common belief. Now it's a good thing that as podcasters, we want to be efficient and, you know, record a podcast interview or a long form piece of content once, and we want to break it up into tiny smaller pieces of micro content to distribute across social media. That is a great plan. And yes, it can be a good way to get organic reach for your podcast. But what I found, and I'm kind of speaking to myself and my own team here as I make this, I don't know if I've ever seen a podcaster who is successfully on every social media platform. However, I'm pretty sure that every single podcaster I have seen has this annoying voice in their head and this low hum of anxiety that they should be on LinkedIn and Twitter and Instagram and TikTok and Facebook and Clubhouse and whatever else comes up. And so if that's you, it probably is because it's me too. If that's you, I'm here to tell you that that is a kind of impossible unless you are, you know, somebody who is a billionaire and his name is, you know, Gary Vee or Grant Cardone or Marie Forleo who has teams of 20-somethings who can repurpose content for you. Unless you are one of those people, you really shouldn't try to be on every platform because it takes a ton of work. And the reason why it takes that much work is because what everyone thinks you have to do to repurpose content and make it work on social media isn't enough. So everybody thinks you record something, you cut one video, right? Maybe a one-minute audio gram or something like that. And then you take that audio gram and you post it across every single social media platform. This totally doesn't work at all, which is a shame because a lot of work went into creating that audio gram or that video or whatever it is and plastering it everywhere, right? The reason why it doesn't work though is because the people who are on those platforms expect that the content that they consume be native to that platform. Tweets have to look like tweets, TikToks have to look like TikToks, Instagram posts have to look like Instagram posts. And so when you make one one-minute-long video or one audio gram which looks like nothing that anybody posts on any social media platform, it doesn't work on any of them. So that's the first pitfall with this strategy, which is in order to successfully be on every single platform ever, you really do have to put a decent amount of energy on each platform, making the content that you publish there look like it should be there and look native to that platform. Honestly, your primary role is a podcaster, your primary role is not that of a omnipresent social media influencer. Yet, you can get there in the future if you want, but that's not the game now. So my hope for you today is to quiet that home of anxiety thinking, oh, I need to be on every platform by pointing out to you that if you look at the top 1000 charts on Apple podcasts, very few of those podcasts are present on every social media platform. I don't know how we got it in our heads that we have to be everywhere all the time on every platform. Not sure, because virtually nobody is again, who doesn't have a massive team, and they would agree that at this stage, we totally don't need that. So what do you do instead? Well, for this, I recommend a strategy that we call one to 10,000, one to 10K. And what we mean by that is you pick one primary social media platform and focus all of your podcast promotion, all of your repurposed content, all of your TDE on that one social media platform. What that's going to do is allow you to truly focus on understanding how people engage on that platform, how it works, what content works, and how you can participate, not promote, but participate on that platform as a means to get people to discover you and your podcast. If you try to spread yourself and cut yourself into six little slices to be on TikTok, and Instagram, and Reels, and Twitter, and everything else, do you really think that one sixth of your energy is going to get you any momentum on any of those platforms? No, it's going to take all of it. So instead of trying to be everywhere now and trying to build six houses at once, instead just pick one, pick one platform that you enjoy consuming, and that your audience also enjoys consuming, because that's important, too, without making assumptions. And just go all in on that one. If your audience is on Instagram, and you like Instagram, be on Instagram, do TDE on Instagram. If you like TikTok, make TikToks, right? If you're a Twitter head, make Twitter threads to promote your show, you don't even need to make anything with video. And the same thing's true for LinkedIn as well. If you're on LinkedIn, be on LinkedIn, focus only on LinkedIn. And finally, if you're on Facebook, focus on a Facebook group and your Facebook personal profile. My challenge to you is to focus on one platform until you surpass 10,000 followers on that platform. If you're on TikTok, make it 100k, because TikTok has crazy numbers. If you're somebody who's already on those platforms, and already has above 10k followers, I would ask you, why try to fix? What ain't broken? If it's already working on that platform, dude, more of that double down. We do not have to be on every social media platform. No podcast listener in the history of podcasts has ever been like, you know what? I don't think I'm going to listen to this show. They're not on all six platforms, right? You're not missing out by being on every platform. In fact, you're missing out by trying to be on every platform, because you're spreading your energy so thin, and you're not reaching anybody anywhere. So that is it for today. The answer to today's question, should you be on every social media platform is a resounding no. It is unnecessary, regardless of what size you are as a podcaster, and instead, it is much better to focus on one. Go all in, quiet that low voice of anxiety, and own it. Be like, you know what? I'm on Instagram. I don't have a Twitter. Cool? Awesome. That's it for today's quick hit. Stop worrying about all the other social media platforms, but all of your energy into one of them. Do your TDE so that you can grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, and I'll see you next week.