150 | 12 Days of Podcast Growth Day #8: How to Promote on Social Media

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland, this is day eight of the 12 days of podcast growth. And today is the day that we are going to talk about growth. This is what you came for, right? So real quick to recap, days one through seven, we talked about how to have an incredible podcast premise and how to make great podcast episodes and how to package those episodes in a way that gets people to actually press play. And hopefully by now you see how much stuff there is to get right before really worrying about your growth strategy, because nine times out of 10, podcasters think they need a better growth strategy. But in reality, there's something off with their premise or their ability to keep listeners. You, however, now know this, you know how to get those things right because you've listened to lessons one through seven of this audio course. And so you are ready to talk growth strategy. So today we're going to focus on the strategy that most podcasters don't maximize, which is social media. And my goal today is to change the way that you think about how to promote your podcast on social media. So fundamentally, the thing to understand about social media is that it allows us podcasters to do three main things among others. Number one, it allows us to engage, which is when we interact directly with our audience. It's how you're able to keep tabs on what's working, what's not, and what content to publish next. And so if you're somebody who struggles with engaging with your audience, social media can be the solution to that. Number two, publishing on social media regularly enables you to remind your audience, the people who already know who you are, it enables you to remind them that there are new episodes available because believe it or not, there are tons of people who love your podcast, but have forgotten about it because you see them subscribing or following to your show in their listening app is actually not enough. It's better if you regularly tell them that there are new episodes out. And the third thing that social media allows us to do is expand our audience. This is where we reach new audiences through targeted engagement and organic reach. And this organic exposure does not come by posting alone. It does not come by gaming the algorithm or gaming hashtags. It is the skill of creating content that delights people on social media. And it is a skill that you can learn to wield no matter whether or not you consider yourself a quote unquote social media person. By the end of this, you'll know how to be a social media person. Before we get there though, a quick word of caution, please do not expect to get instant podcast downloads from a single post. So I see it all the time where podcasters post on social media and then they go check their download numbers. It doesn't really work like that. The goal with your social media content is to get followers on social media first and then through gradually reminding them that your podcast exists and sharing little nuggets, you will lead them to your podcast. And so it's a long term game. And again, the goal with your social media content is primarily to grow your following on social media and secondarily to CCA them to go listen to your show. And when you take this approach, podcast growth is slow and steady, but it does happen. Now, one of the first questions that I get from podcasters who are looking to grow on social media is what is the best social media platform to use? And there's a lot of answers to that question. But when it comes to choosing your social media platform or platforms to grow your podcast, my favorite approach is to follow the one to 10k rule. And the idea behind that is that you want to focus your efforts on one, only one social media platform until your audience hits at least 10k on that platform. And if you're somebody who already has an audience above that, you can skip the one to 10k rule. But if you're not, I know what your question is. But Kevin, don't I need to be on all social media platforms? Someday, yes, that will be the goal, but not yet. It is way easier to go all in on one social media platform, get really good at it. You will grow much quicker there with your focused energy, and then it's going to be way easier for you to simply transfer your audience to another platform and transfer the skills that you build on that one platform to the other platforms. OK, so we want to pick one social media platform, but which social media platform should you choose? Well, you want to choose that based on a couple things. Number one, you want to choose based on your strengths. Now, podcasting is kind of funny because podcasting is an audio medium, but there are no audio social media platforms. And so to promote our podcast, we have to promote the show with a different medium than the show is super, super weird, super unique. And so basically when you're choosing your social media strategy, you want to choose. Do you want to make videos to promote your podcast or do you want to write to promote your podcast? If you're into videos, you might use Instagram Reels or TikTok or YouTube Shorts or Facebook Reels. And if you're a writer, you might use LinkedIn or Threads or Twitter or something like that. And from there, when choosing the social platform to promote your show on, you also want to pick a platform that fits the context of your show. I hear a lot of people say, oh, I need to pick a platform where my audience is and my audience is people over 30. And so I'm not going to choose TikTok. I've got news. Boomers use TikTok, Gen Z uses Instagram, try not to make wide assumptions based on demographics. They tend to not be as true as you think and everybody uses every platform. But what's more important to choosing the right social media platform than demographic is actually the context of your podcast. What do I mean by that? Well, if your podcast is an entertainment show, TikTok will probably do pretty well. If your show is about marketing or business, then LinkedIn might be a better choice. So as you can see, there are a couple of things that go into picking what social media platform to choose as your primary platform to promote. But above all, I recommend going hard on one of the platforms instead of trying to be on all of them at once. And when you pick one, finally, pick a platform that you're going to enjoy spending time on because you will need to spend time on the social media platform in order to grow your audience there. So it should ideally be something that you like to do. So now that we know what social media platform that we want to be on, the next question is, okay, how do I promote my podcast on that social media platform and get new listeners, right? Well, if you take away anything from this lesson on social media, let it be this. Don't promote, participate. So when you publish a podcast episode, you might be tempted to fire up social media and think to yourself, okay, I got a promote podcast. How can I do this and as little time as possible? And so you just say, hey, everyone, new podcast, episode available, go listen now. And that actually doesn't work too well. And here's why while promoting our podcast is indeed our ultimate goal while we're on social media, if that is what's top of mind for you while you're posting and interacting on social media, your social content probably isn't going to do anything to bring you listeners because you're more likely to make your content too pushy or too salesy or it's just too obvious that you're just there to try to get people to listen to your podcast. And people can sense that and they don't really like it. And so those posts don't perform very well. Those are the posts that you see that get no likes and no comments and no views. Instead, you want to try to publish social media content that has one goal. And that is to delight the viewer. You want to participate in social media rather than promote yourself on social media. That is the key because growing a podcast audience on social is not about promoting your episodes. It's about using the content from your episodes to create awesome social media posts. Those posts will actually get likes. They will get comments. They will get shares and they will get you followers. And those followers will become your podcast listeners counterintuitively. This long game approach brings the fastest growth. And what's funny about audience growth is that the faster you try to get it, the slower it tends to happen. True with money too. Think of it this way, your social media content should be like a free sample cookie outside of a bakery. So imagine that you are a baker and you want people to come inside your bakery and buy a dozen cookies. If you stand outside the bakery and offer free cookies, many people will take the free cookie and they'll move on with their day. They won't come into your bakery and they won't buy cookies. And that's okay because some people will. They'll take the cookie. They'll be like, oh my gosh, this is awesome. And they will want more. And so they go inside and they buy, right? Compare that to if you own the bakery and you just stood outside the bakery yelling at everybody in the street saying cookies, get cookies here. I have amazing cookies. You should buy my cookies. Do you think anybody's going to come inside the bakery? Maybe a couple of weirdos, but not a lot. What's more likely to happen is that people are going to actually cross the street to avoid passing your bakery because they don't want to tell you no. They don't want you to scream at them to go inside your bakery, right? The same thing is true with your podcast. Your podcast is the bakery and social media platforms is the sidewalk outside of your bakery. If you're posting content that says, new episode now, here's a headshot of my guest. Go listen to my podcast. People are going to cross the street. They're going to unfollow you on social media. But if you instead offer free samples of your best cookie, aka awesome social media posts, the bakery aka your podcast will thrive. It will get more customers, aka listeners. But then, okay, how does one actually use the content that you generate on your podcast to create awesome social media posts? Well, I like to think that there are two main ways to do it. The first way is the one that a lot of podcasters have heard of, which is repurposing content. That's what most people think of when they think of promoting a podcast on social. And that's where you chop pieces up, you take your podcast, you chop up a bunch of clips, and you post those on social media. And those can work. They're a little overplayed at this point. And they're not the silver bullet audience growth strategy that most people think that they are. Again, not to say that they're not worth posting, they are. But what I've seen to really work well to grow an audience on social media is the other type of content that you get from your podcast. And that's that free sample type content. And that's what I call summary content. Summary content is where you create social media content separately and specifically for a given platform that summarizes the useful and entertaining stuff from your podcast episode. So you're not just repurposing stuff that you already made, you're actually making new content, but you're using the stuff from your podcast episode in that content. And so I'll put in the show notes, an example of me publishing summary content from a recent episode of this podcast, Grow the Show, where I featured Amy Porterfield. So when that episode came out, I posted a thread on Twitter and threads. That thread was a bunch of tweets that summarized Amy Porterfield's four tips for growing a podcast. It performed incredibly, it got me more impressions on social media than I've ever gotten before. And I also published a carousel on Instagram that did the same thing. It took some of the stuff that Amy shared with me and I made an Instagram image carousel out of it. And so as I said, the links are going to be in the show notes so you can click on those and check those out. By the way, if you haven't followed me, shoot me, shoot me, you know, and you'll see how I used the stuff that Amy shared with me and created net new social media content from what she taught me, rather than simply just copying and pasting a clip of what she shared. Now I'll also put in the show notes a link to the repurposed pieces that I shared from the very same episode and you'll kind of see what the difference is between those two. One of them is just a chop, again, it's just you take a clip, you chop it out, you post it, those do okay. You'll see that the ones where I actually created, I went out of my way to create real, native looking social media content from the insights that Amy shared with me and those performed amazingly. I got tons of new listeners from that. There are still, there are people who are now clients of mine who said, oh, yeah, I found you from the Amy Porter field threat. And so for me, the promo content on social that drove the most new listeners from that episode was not the repurposed content where I grabbed a bunch of clips and posted them. Those did okay. It was the summary content. And I can tell you that there are countless other podcasters who are starting to do this and it's working really well. Every single time they publish a podcast episode, if they are a Twitter focused person, they write a thread that summarizes what they learned. And at the end of the thread, they say, by the way, if you want more of this, you should listen to my podcast episode. Similarly, I'm starting to see some grow the show podcasters who are primarily video folks on social media using stuff that they're learning on their podcast and creating TikToks out of it. And it crushes. And again, at the end, they're just like, oh, by the way, if you want to learn more about this, you should check out my podcast episode. So again, the two pieces of social media content that I think will help you grow your audience and promote your podcast the most are number one, yes, repurposed content, but number two, and most importantly, summary content. The idea is take what you've shared on the podcast episode, make social media content that looks like social media content. It doesn't look like somebody trying to promote their podcast episode with all kinds of logos everywhere. It looks like real, genuine content on social media and watch how much more quickly you are able to reach folks and you're able to get your audience to grow. So hopefully now you're looking at social media a little bit differently and you'll be able to take a new approach to growing your audience there. And remember, the goal with your content on social is not to get people to jump and immediately go listen to your podcast episode because that's just not how it works. People are scrolling social media while they're like watching Netflix or while they're in line at the grocery store or something like that, they're not doing it while they're about to listen to a podcast episode. So just know that it's not a one-to-one thing where you post and you get downloads. It's a longer term game and the strategy is to grow your social media presence, which in turn will grow your podcast audience as well. So that's going to do it for this lesson on social media growth. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about the second half of the podcast growth battle, which is getting featured on other podcasts. And the idea there will be that we want to get featured on the podcasts that your future listeners are listening to today. And I'm going to share an algorithm that I created to identify what those shows are. That'll be tomorrow in day nine. I'll see you then. By the way, if you want to get written versions of these lessons emailed to you each and every single day, simply go to 12 days of podcast growth dot com. That's one, two days of podcast growth dot com. And you will receive the remaining lessons in your inbox daily. I'll see you there. I'll see you tomorrow.