[2021] How to Make Your Podcast's Social Media Content Stand Out, with Hala Taha

Question for you. What is the content that you post on social media to promote your podcast look like? Do you post audiograms? Do you post fancy headshots of your guest, maybe with their name and your podcast logo next to them? Do you post little two-minute video clips to IGTV or LinkedIn with captions and a headline? And how is all that content working for you? Is that podcast promo content and all the time you put into making it regularly getting your podcast new listeners? And what does the rest of your social media feed look like? Do you post any other type of content or is it just check out my podcast, Lincoln Bio? And how do you know whether that content is actually bringing you new listeners? Is it worth the squeeze? Is it working? What is your social media strategy? Well, this is a question that I get all the time from podcasters in my accelerator program in the Grow the Show free Facebook group and just podcasters that I come across. What should my social media content look like? How often should I post? What should I post? What is enough? What is going to get me new listeners for my podcast? And I'm happy to answer that question. But I'm not going to answer that question today. Now somebody else is going to answer that question for you. That's somebody else is Hala Taha. And we're going to learn how she approaches social media for the purposes of growing a podcast. And you're going to want to listen to what Hala has to say. Because while Hala and I launched our first podcasts within a month of each other back in the spring of 2018. And while I've done pretty well going from zero to about 250,000 total downloads in only three years, Hala has done a little bit better. And she's done it via social media. Yeah, Hala Taha is on another level because her download count is in the millions. And she got there mainly by having an incredibly effective social media presence, which she's going to teach us today. But she also had a couple of other growth tips and growth hacks that other podcasters really aren't utilizing that really took her download numbers into the next level. And today you're going to learn exactly what those are. This is Grow the Show. The podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to help you the independent podcaster to grow your podcast audience and monetize now so you can have a thriving podcast business. Today we're joined by the host of Young and Profiting. Her name is Hala Taha and she's going to share with us her strategy for growing a podcast on and off of social media. And the best part is that these strategies are not rocket science and they're probably not even that much different than what you're already doing today. So if you're ready to hear how Hala Taha took her podcast into the millions in under three years and how you can do it even quicker than stick around here on Grow the Show. My name is Hala Taha and I'm the host of Young and Profiting Podcasts and the CEO of YAP Media. I started my career in radio in college. I landed an internship my junior year at hot 97. It's the world's number one hip-hop and R&B station and you know I worked myself up to the studio department. I was in the production department and I worked on the Angie Martinez Show and I ended up you know being her assistant being her assistant producer. I dropped out of school for this opportunity and I ended up working there every day and it became like my job. Worked there for free even though I dropped out of school and I worked there every single day back then like and probably still now radio folks like really pay their dues. I mean it was just a way for me to learn new skills. It was so exciting for me to be running the boards and it was so much power to be the one on the boards. It was so cool to have everyone say my name on the radio or be like hear my commercial on the radio to for millions of people to hear. It was just so motivating to me and also just being exposed to such successful people at a young age I think really shaped me. After three years of Hala grinding it out completely unpaid she was looking for her chance to take the next step at hot 97. She wanted to be an official producer and you know get paid. A paying job opened up it was Angie Martinez's producer. Again I was in my early 20s but I wanted it and they ended up hiring somebody who's just a couple years older than me. He had no studio experienced and I was fed up. After three entire years of doing tons of free work for the station Hala felt that she deserved that job so she spoke up. I kind of stood up for myself and maybe that was the right thing to do because they were obviously just using me right and so I did that and Angie Martinez just fired me. She basically told everyone they can't talk to me anymore and so my whole network was shut down in one day. She tried to totally shut me down like no one's going to mess with you anymore like goodbye and I decided to take things into my own hands. I decided that I was going to dictate my life and no one's going to blackball me from this industry and I'll make it with or without hot 97. Hala took her talents to the internet. I started a blog and I decided I was going to start something called the sorority of hip hop. We became one of the most popular hip hop entertainment news sites and at the height of it I had 50 female bloggers under me and the way that we did it was through hacking Twitter essentially so I figured out how to automate where whenever we post a blog on all the girls accounts it would tweet out the person's name and like app mentioned them and so we had like Drake retweeting us and Whiskly for retweeting us and all these celebs retweeting us so it just all really happened for us. We had online radio shows and then we almost got a show on MTV twice. They filmed a whole reality TV show for an entire summer. They got us a studio on Broadway. It was like the real world type of a thing Jersey Shore yeah and then they pulled the plug and they decided not to air the show. Once again Hala had invested tons of time into something and again it was yanked out from under her with nothing to show for it. And that's when I was like oops I should probably just go get a real job now so I just gave up I was like I'm waving the white flag I can't take this anymore and so I decided okay I'm just gonna go get my MBA I'm gonna just try to learn that helped me get a job at Hewlett Packard and then I just started my corporate career. With that Hala started from the bottom and began to work her way up the corporate ladder and she climbed fast. Got promoted like very very quickly in that company and I thought that I was gonna be really behind my peers but turns out that I was so much more advanced in terms of my marketing knowledge that I really just skipped over everyone once I got there plus my networking skills were out of this world because that's what I did for so long and so it just really helped me be like an intrapreneur within the company I got promoted five times in in four years basically. In addition to crushing her normal responsibilities at that job she also took lots of initiative and did tons of extra curricular stuff too. I start this like young employee network and I'm the president I do that for two years I launched their first ever company picnic I do their first holiday party I started all their traditions all their charity events all that stuff it got me really close with the CEO the CMO of a company because I was doing all this cool stuff at the office right and I was the one asking them for budget and so it really helped elevate me and that's also why I kept getting promoted because I was like being seen as like the face of the young employees right so then I got on the global young employee network and now I was leading not just the hundred people in my office I was leading seven thousand people all over the world and I was the recruitment chair I didn't get the president right away so I started something called HPE Spirit Week and it was a week long event all across HPE at the time there was 300,000 employees there was 500 events over 700 people helped me plan they're still doing it till this day it was like this huge hit I was emailing the whole company every single day as if I was the CEO right everybody knew who I was then it's time for me to be president of the global young employee network because that was the next logical step and I was the most qualified and all my peers wanted me to have it and people submitted videos to request me the HR person ended up putting somebody in the president's seat who never was involved with the young employee network who had no experience and who did not deserve it again I worked for free I basically side hustled for the company and dedicated my time to the community and building all these events they're still using all my templates all that and they kicked me to the curb right after all this free work so I was like damn again I made the same mistake hello had done a bunch of free work for somebody and she got burned once more meanwhile her normal day-to-day role at the company while quite impressive for somebody only four years into their career also wasn't doing it for her I really felt like you know this this is not truly what I want to do and I don't feel 100% fulfilled and that is how she came upon her next side hustle I was gonna start a podcast which was totally different than my last endeavors it was more business focused more pure intentions not really all about attention it was more about giving back teaching people how to be successful because I had become successful finally and I was like now that I have a massive sort of success let me try to give this back and teach people how to be successful too and that is how young and profiting was born and even though this was technically how his first podcast she found that she already had the experience she needed to do it really well all throughout before HP I was doing online radio shows all the time and so I knew how to audio edit I knew how to research for a show I knew how to structure a show I knew how to basically talk on a mic I was rusty because it was four years of a break so when I got on the mic I was rusty again in terms of like my speaking but I could get it back relatively quickly right and so I had all these skills I decided to change the angle I wanted it to be more meaningful I didn't want it to be about music and gossip and entertainment I really wanted it to be something meaningful that would help elevate people's lives and so I just basically stacked all these experiences together a lot of people say their first episode sucks my first episode was like amazing and so was my second and third and then it just kept scaling until I got more and more consistent but it was hard I mean I was working a full-time job at the time there wasn't a lot of resources for podcasters like I started this in April 2018 and so I just went at it I just decided I was gonna make it happen and I just was consistent and I kept working and evolving and increasing the frequency of my show and the quality of my show and just kept it going today young and profiting has amassed millions of downloads so how did she do it how did she go from zero to beyond a million downloads in only three years while the answer to that is quite simple social media however while most podcasters are focusing on Instagram still today Hala back in 2018 decided to take advantage of a different platform so when I started my podcast I knew that I needed a way to get the word out and at the time LinkedIn was a place where people started to first post content I decided that I was gonna start my personal brand in order to get the word out about my podcast that is the way to do it now today Hala has over 80,000 LinkedIn followers but at this point in 2018 she did not have nearly that many so how did she build up to 80,000 followers on LinkedIn and over a million downloads of her podcast all by herself well if you've heard the targeted daily engagement episode of this podcast what Hala is about to share might sound familiar either way she started by figuring out where her dream listeners were already congregated on the platform is there somebody who you follow that you feel like their fans would really resonate with what you're doing so for example Gary Vee at the time was like the only podcaster on LinkedIn that I knew and he had a great fan base that was as obsessed with him so I basically just invited anybody who liked or commented on his recent post and I'd say hey my name is Hala and I meet you I notice you like Gary Vee's podcast and content I have a podcast too I think you're gonna like mine I'd love to provide value on your feed and 9 out of 10 people would accept and then I would put a witty comment on Gary Vee's post and I'd get 100 likes and be the top comment then people would randomly go to my page and look at my content and check me out and I would just get followers that way the other benefit is when you're inviting someone to connect right I would send them a DM afterwards and be like and here's a link to my podcast in case you're interested right after they accepted the connection request and then at the same time I was posting consistent valuable content the key here is consistent content in addition to targeted daily engagement every single day I treated LinkedIn like it was my personal diary she had the time to engage and publish on social media baked into her calendar I had a commute I was living in Brooklyn and I had to take the train every day to work and so I decided that that 40 minutes on the train is when I would do my LinkedIn post every single day and so I used my skills as a writer to really stand out on LinkedIn and be motivational and inspirational and a lot of my posts were getting traction but how do you make content that stands out on any given platform not just LinkedIn this is one of the most common questions that I get from podcasters luckily hola has a three step answer so if you want your social media content to delight your followers and bring listeners to your profile here's what you need to do you want to provide content that's going to be shareable as well as promotional and personal so shareable content is something that could go viral it's not heavily branded it doesn't have your picture on it necessarily it's a motivational or inspirational quote it's educational it's something that people would share just because it provides value it's insightful right and so you need to have content like that so that your post can go viral because your promotional posts are almost never going to go viral they're always the ones that actually do the worst and also the other key here is personal stories so people love seeing other humans the bigger the face the better on the content I always say like make sure your face has the most real estate on the post in terms of the you know the ratio because people love human connection and stories and so telling your personal story also is going to do really well in terms of engaging your current following shareable content is going to grow your following and then promotional content is how you sell and you should do the least of that because your goal especially when you're starting out is to grow a community to get them to trust you and then you can start to promote to them and sell to them but I would definitely suggest like even with my following I do one podcast post a week and it's always my worst post go go figure remember every time you ask somebody to listen to your podcast you're selling and you can only sell so much on your feed and on most podcasters feeds that's all they do but it's much better to only sell or promote your podcast on your feed once a week if that besides there's actually a place in the app other than your content feed where it's much more effective to sell your show honestly you convert social media listeners in the DMs not in the post and so I've converted so many people who follow me on LinkedIn through the DMs not through my post it's more about having a conversation giving them the direct link asking them for feedback and playing in the DMs now having said all this about how to position your social media presence to get your podcast to more listeners there is one very important fact that you need to keep in mind 50% of people in America have never listened to a podcast and so half the battle is over on social media you have two battles listen to my podcasts and please like podcasts you know you're trying to convert them on the actual technology and that's really hard to do essentially what this means is that your social following can and will get watered down by people who aren't interested in podcasts at all so how can you promote your podcast to people who you know actually like podcasts to begin with this is the dark horse growth strategy that Hala has used to make her podcast audience absolutely explode and while you clicked on this episode to learn how to make great social media content Hala is about to share with you a growth method that has nothing to do with social media apps it all revolves around the apps where people actually listen to podcasts so in app strategies are everything that have to do with podcast apps so there's many apps out there a lot of people think it's just apple and Spotify it's not apple has 40% of the market share Spotify has 20% all the other apps have 40% that's cast box overcast pocket cast pod bean podcast addicts all these other apps make up 40% of the industry which is a lot right and so you can target listeners on social media but you're going to have a hard time because they prefer other types of content and so those are people you're targeting on social media who will never listen to your podcast if you target people who are already listening in the podcast apps you're going to have a much higher success rate because 100% of those people like to listen to podcasts have heard about a podcast already listen to podcasts and so that's why focusing in app is so powerful and that's what changed the game for me I realize that apple is not the only game in town for a long time I would message people on LinkedIn like I told you through the DMs and I would say could you leave me an apple podcast and then be like well I actually I watch on YouTube or I don't have an iPhone or I listen on Spotify and then I realize people are not freaking listening on Apple I don't know what all the hype is about but there's a lot of other apps people are really on cast box you know and all these other apps so what I did is I decided to leverage my LinkedIn following and I reached out to all these different apps and I would say like hey I have a huge following on LinkedIn I'm known for my podcast I'd love to do a contest in return for you promoting me an app so a lot of these apps have features that they don't necessarily advertise where they have featured podcasts they have banner ads they can do push mobile messages to their subscribers there's a lot of things that they can do they have email lists whatever it is and so I basically was like I'll trade my audience for your audience are you game and they were like sure let's try it nobody else is asking us this so you're the only one asking so let's do this they were happy and you know all they said and I went from having no subscribers on cast box to 10,000 to 25,000 to now I have almost 80,000 subscribers on cast box just on cast box and just promoting with them collaborating with them I promoted them a podcast they promoted me again now I'm getting them paid ads for my clients and stuff like that so like that is one strategy just collaborating with those apps and then I started experimenting on pod bean and pocket cast and overcast and seeing what is the best media buys out there and also who's willing to collaborate and kind of trade their paid advertising in return for social media promotion so I did that game for a long time where I would just trade contests and promotions on LinkedIn for getting featured in app and that's where when I got hockey stick growth that's when I went from getting 4,000 downloads a month to 12,000 now in a typical day so they're all different that's the thing you have to do your research it's the wild wild west and everything is different so some websites like overcast you could just go buy ads you could just go buy ads on their website I will say that overcast is very expensive there's something called there's a metric called subscriber acquisition cost and that's the metric that you care about when you're doing podcast media buys it can range from under a dollar to eight dollars that's how crazy the difference is and so that's why it's important to experiment so like overcast might charge you five dollars to subscriber which is relatively expensive so there's other places that you can do and test that may get you under two dollars to subscriber but what about if you don't have any budget to pay for ads in the podcasting apps is there another alternate way for an independent podcaster to take advantage of the podcasting apps so the other way besides media buys to do this is to actually guest on other podcasts like I'm doing on yours so that's a hack that you can do without any money without any social media following is to basically team up with other podcasters in your niche and go on each other's podcasts if you guys aren't a good fit for each other's podcasts you can also read commercials for each other and so you can do that the other thing that you can do is do review swaps with other podcasters and so if I was a new podcaster and I had no social media following and I had no budget the first thing that I would do is start a community of podcasters I would start a community I would reach out to every podcaster in my niche I would go on chartable the podcast apple charts and I would go see who's ranking above me and below me I would find out who those people were I would contact them I would get them all in some sort of a group but what's up group a telegram group whatever it is and a call once a month and I would come up with strategies where we would guest on each other's podcasts where we would swap commercials and basically share each other's audiences we would also share our social media links and start an engagement pod so that we would support each other on social and basically help elevate all of us okay let's recap so halitaha has shared with us three strategies she has used to take her podcast young and profiting past two million downloads first she shared her strategy for growing a social media account which sounded a lot like targeted daily engagement she also shared her strategy for how to create really engaging and effective shareable personal and promotional content then she lesson on a pretty big secret that 40% of podcast listeners use apps other than apple and Spotify and that those apps actively promote podcasts to their users by bartering and paying for placement in those apps you can see some pretty major gains in listenership and finally she shared a strategy that you've probably heard before but also probably haven't tried do a promo swap with other podcasts in your niche and team up with each other to grow your shows now that is all a lot to do to grow your podcast so if you would like extra support in doing so if you'd like direct feedback on the social content you create if you'd like to team up with over 400 other podcasters to figure out how to get featured by the alternate apps and if you'd like a place where you can find and team up with other talented podcasters in your niche then look no further than the grow the show Facebook group it's totally free and you'll get all of those things at once please do join us we'd love to see you there and say hello the link is in the show notes grow the show is a Q9 production this episode was produced and hosted by me with associate production by Catherine Nails post production by Max Graham and a huge thanks to today's guest ha ha for grow the show my name is Kevin Schmidtland until next time