96: How to Get Guests to Share Your Podcast on Social Media

This is Grow the Show, the podcast to help you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland. I am a two-time podcaster and podcast coach. I've taken two shows past six figures and downloads and six figures in revenue. And today, we are going to be tackling a Grow the Show audience question about how to get your podcast guests to actually spread the word and get their audience to tune in to their episode of your podcast. Let's hear the question. Hey, Kevin, it's Matt Rafferty from the author inside you podcast and I appreciate everything you do. I'm wondering what's the best practice for getting guests to share the podcast episode once it's been released? My practice is to send them a copy of the artwork from my podcast and to give them a suggested Facebook post that's also short enough that they can post on Twitter and I also give them a link. And I find that most times people won't share it or if they do share it, they only share it once and they move on. How can I get guests to be excited about the episode and get them to continually share it on their social media and with their friends and family? All right, Matt. That is a really great question and let me first say that you are not alone. This is an extremely common problem that podcasters face far and wide. The guests that they have on the show agree that they will help promote the episode and then when the time comes to promote the episode, they don't really do that at all. What gives? Why is that the case? What can we do to get them to share the episode? Well, before we can figure out how to get our guests to actually spread the word to their own audience about their appearance on your podcast, the first thing we have to understand is why a guest doesn't share or spread the word about your episode featuring them. The first reason is that they totally intend to and they want to, but it's just too much work. These people are busy. They probably have a hard enough time promoting their own stuff on social media and so they might just never really get around to it or there's just too many steps for them to take and it just keeps getting put to the bottom of their to-do list and they never do it. That's the first reason why guests don't share, but the second reason why and in my opinion, the most common reason why you actually alluded to in your question, which is the guest is not excited to share your promo content or your episode with their audience? It's not something that makes them look good. It's not something that they want to do, so they don't. So why aren't they excited about sharing your podcast episode with their audience? Well, I'm not speaking directly to you here, Matt, because I've never heard your show. I don't know if it's good or bad, but in almost every case, it's because one of two reasons, either number one, your podcast episode and or the promo content that you give them to share isn't good. It's not extraordinary. It's not something that makes them look awesome and it's not something that they think their audience is going to want to see or hear. Or in many cases, your episode interviewing that person is not unique, meaning you asked to the same questions or talked about the same topics that they have covered many, many, many times. And so their audience has already heard them talk about this stuff and it wouldn't make sense to share with it because you asked them the same questions they always get asked. So their audience has already heard them answer those questions. So now that we've identified the reasons why guests don't spread the word about your episode, number one, it's too much work for them. Number two, your episode wasn't that good. Number three, the episode wasn't unique or number four, the promo content that you gave them to share doesn't make them look good is not really great social media content. Those are the four reasons. Now that we know those, it's actually pretty easy to figure out how to actually get them to do that, right? Now, before we talk about how to do that, please understand that even if your guest does spread the word about your episode, number one, I really wouldn't expect them to spread the word more than once. They've already done you a favor by appearing on your episode, you know, by talking to you for an hour. So they don't owe it to you to spread the word number one. And if they only make a post once, I think that's okay. Like I really don't think that we should expect these folks to, you know, plaster it far and wide. That's a lot of work. So I'm happy if they do share it once with their audience. Either way, another thing to understand before we talk about how to do this right is that conversions from social media to podcast listenership is always low. Even with your own audience, it's pretty inefficient, meaning when someone sees social media content promoting a podcast episode, it is extremely rare that they write them in there, put their phone down, stop scrolling and go listen to your podcast episode or watch it if you're on YouTube. It's rare. What has to happen is they have to see the content and then later on, when they're usually consuming podcasts, they have to remember that your show exists, that their favorite person was on it, go seek out the episode, remember what your show was called or what your name was, click on it, listen to it, there's a lot of work for a listener to do. To understand that even when your guest does promote their episode on social media a ton, conversions are going to be lower than you expect almost every time. But either way, it still does help. So how do we get podcast guests to actually spread the word? It actually starts with preparing for the episode. It starts before you even interview that person. The number one thing that you can do to make it so that your guests actually share your episode is number one, make the episode really good, better than average. And I know you're thinking, oh, my show is better than average. Everybody thinks that, which means that 5% of people are wrong and that might be you. Think about it. But number two, if you're able to make the episode unique, not ask the guest the same questions that they always answer, what's your background? What do you think are the keys to success, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? And you ask specific things around a specific topic. And the guest is going to be really, really excited to share it. anecdotally, what I can say is that when I see influencers online actually sharing themselves on other podcasts, which is way more rare now than it used to be because they're on so many podcasts. If they shared every show that they were on, their whole feed would be them sharing podcasts. So you have to stand out and be the best one that they've been on in the past year. A lot of times what they'll say is, hey, everybody, I was just on the XYZ show and I shared something in that episode that I've never shared before. You should go check it out, right? So the best way to get these people to share starts before interviewing the person and deciding on a topic or angle that they've never talked about before that will be very, very interesting to their audience. So that's number one. Number two, like I said, make the episode really good if it's mediocre. If you spend no time editing it or really putting thought into making a great piece of content, they're not going to share it because they're only going to share stuff that makes them look awesome. That's extraordinary. And then number three, once the episode gets published, if you want them to post on social media, you do want to ideally do as much of the work for them like Matt to ask her this question mentioned, I give them my podcast artwork, I give them something to post on Facebook and maybe on Twitter if they want and they don't post it. That's good. But there's three things you have to keep in mind when you do that. Number one, you have to ask yourself, what social media platforms are these? These guests already posting to regularly. So I would assert that there are probably a subset of some of the guests, Matt that you're thinking of, who you've had on the show, who don't post on Facebook. They don't have an audience on Facebook. They might not even have an audience on Twitter when setting a plan for how you're going to promote the episode, look at your guest's social media presence and notice where they are the most active and try to create promo content that matches that. If there's someone that posts on TikTok all the time, you should make a TikTok. If there's someone that posts on Twitter all the time, you should give them fodder to tweet or even better, make a really great Twitter thread about the episode and tag them in it so that they can simply retweet it. That is exactly what I did with Grow the Show guest, Ariel Nissenblatt. Now if you follow me on Twitter, I'm not super active on Twitter, I've got like 700 followers on Twitter, I'm not there a lot. But last year, I featured Ariel Nissenblatt on Grow the Show and she talked about how to do social media really well. Now I noticed that Ariel is most active and has the largest audience on Twitter. So I said, what's the best way for me to get this episode in front of Ariel's audience? Probably for her to talk about it on Twitter, right? So what did I do? I wrote the only Twitter thread that I wrote in all of 2022 about her episode. I made that Twitter thread something that actually gives value and summarizes the point that we made. And I tagged her in. What did she do? She immediately retweeted it to her audience and the episode got several hundred more downloads than the previous one. Because I was able to take the promo social media content, featuring that person and make it the same as something that person would post on their own and then they were happy to reshare. Also, it made it super easy for Ariel to share that with her audience because all she had to do was hit retweet instead of having a copy and paste. What I had wrote is probably not in her voice, but you've already lost her or any guest, right? Too much work. So number one, make the social media promo content actually be something that this person would already share with their audience. Make sure it's on a platform that they're actually active on. Number two, make it really good and valuable. So there's a really, really good chance that that podcast guest isn't going to share your podcast artwork because their audience doesn't care about your podcast artwork. They care about that person and what they have to say. And so even though in this case, Matt, you make it easy for your guests to post on Facebook and Twitter because you give them an image and some texts, they probably don't do that because number one, your podcast artwork is not great content that their audience wants to see. Your audience is going to see your podcast artwork show up in their feed. They're not going to know what it is. They're going to scroll past. Number two, you made it easy, but there's a really good chance that you made it easy for them to promote on a platform that they don't use. So they're not going to do it. Finally, you want to make sure that the episode is unique and really good so that it is something that they want to share with their audience, friends and family. And I'm going to close with that one because personally, that has been in my experience the way that guests have actually shared episodes of my podcast that they appeared on. Back when I was creating Phillyhoo, a podcast about really successful people in Philadelphia, I remember I would pour blood sweat and tears into making great episodes with each guest. And when I gave them social media content to post about it, they posted it. Now I always made a point to make that content match that person's online voice. But also, you know, it was a point of pride. My episodes made them sound cooler, smarter and more awesome than they actually sounded in real life. And I say that because that's what they've told me so many of those guests up to NFL players have reached out to me and say, dude, you maybe sound so great in this episode. I sound so cool. I've shared it with everybody. And to this day, sometimes I still find that guests of Phillyhoo, whose episode aired in like 2018, 2019, have their episode on their website. They're still sharing it to this day because it was so unique and so great. The same thing has happened with Grow the Show. I've had podcasters on Grow the Show who are on tons and tons of podcasts and never promote the podcast that they're on. But they promoted being on Grow the Show because the show was really well written. It was well produced. We did a lot of editing. I added voiceovers to make it a really great listening experience. And in many cases, we talk about something that that person has never spoken about before or in an angle that they've never spoken about before. As an example, one of the very, very first guests of the Grow the Show podcast was an online influencer named Alex Hillman, who's a great friend of mine. He was also a guest on Phillyhoo back in the day. He came on to Grow the Show to talk about how to grow an audience in Facebook groups and Grow the Show is for podcasters. So we made that episode about how to do that. And without me asking, he went on Twitter and posted to his Twitter audience of several tens of thousands, hey, everyone, I was on the Grow the Show podcast this week. And I talked about the concepts that I talk about a lot. But for the first time ever, we talked about how they specifically applied a podcasters. It was really interesting. You should check it out. So because it was super unique, Alex spread the word of the episode far and wide. That was episode, I think, three of the Grow the Show podcasts. And within the first week of the show launching, it got like a thousand downloads. It was awesome. In summation, here's how you get guests to actually spread the word about your show. Number one, make the episode unique compared to other episodes that they've been a guest on and make it really good. Again, everybody thinks that their show is above average. Fifth percent of you are not correct. So make your show better. Number three, when the time comes to promote the episode, look at their social media presence and create really good content. That's good. Again, it's not just like a podcast artwork or an audiogram. It's like really good content that matches the platform that that guest is most active on and has the biggest audience on create content, make it really good, and then make it really easy for that person to share that content. Make it so that all they have to do is do that you want to talk or retweet you on Twitter or on Instagram, if you post a real, you can make them like a co-poster. All I had to do is hit a prove and then it gets shown to their whole audience. Make it really good, make them look good, and make it easy. If you do all this, you are going to find that your guests actually start to share your show. Matt, I want to thank you for the question. Like I said, I'm willing to bet that one of the things that I've mentioned here in the show is why your guests aren't spreading the word and just based on the way that you asked your question and how good of an idea you have of what your audience is. I'm willing to bet it's probably not the quality of your show, although I'd look there to see how you can make your show improve. It's probably the fact that you're giving them just your podcast artwork to share. Nobody's going to want to share that on their feed and there's a good chance that you're asking them to share on platforms that they really aren't familiar with, aren't active on or maddened, even not even having to count on. So hopefully this was helpful to you, Matt, thank you so much for the question. Everybody go check out Matt's show and hopefully it was valuable to you, the independent podcasters who's looking to get more of your guests to spread the word. One thing that you take away from this, make your show awesome and people will want to tell other people about it, including your guests. So that's going to do it for this episode of Grow the Show. My name is Kevin Schriffin. I am your podcast growth coach and I will see you in the next one.