Targeted Daily Engagement: How To Use Social Media to Double Your Audience

So if there's one thing that I've learned about podcasting, it is that it is really easy to launch a podcast, but really, really, really difficult to grow a podcast. And if you've launched your own show, you definitely know what I mean. Most people who launch get an initial buzz from the launch, their friends and family tune in, maybe some folks on social media who already follow you, and then pretty quickly you hit a plateau. And soon after launching, your listenership numbers stop going up. And the reason that most podcasters experience this is because most podcasters base their growth strategy, or lack thereof, on hope. They hope that their audience will spread the word and their show will grow via word of mouth. They hope that their guests will share the social media assets that you have given them and share with their audience on social media that they were on your show. And they mostly don't do that. Podcasters also hope that maybe someday some big celebrity will discover the show and maybe even come on the show and spread the word and then everything will blow up and you'll make tons of money. And I'm just here to say that that doesn't actually happen. It never, ever, ever works that way. And many of you who have had a celebrity on your show have probably learned that it gives you a modest bump in downloads. But after that, really not much. And so it turns out that hoping isn't a solid strategy. Hoping doesn't actually make your podcast grow. And I should know because I was one of those podcasters relying on hope when I first launched my show, Philly Ho. At first, the show got some serious buzz and Philly. So much buzz that I decided to quit my day job. And then shortly after I quit my day job, that buzz faded and the audience started shrinking. Even though I was spending tons and tons of time on the podcast editing and creating those social assets and all those things. So what did I learn? Well, after a couple months of my show shrinking, even though I was working on it full time, I was about to run out of savings. And so what I did was I put my show on hold. I stopped, I broke the almighty consistency rule and said, okay, I'm going to not release episodes. And I'm not even going to work on the show for a couple weeks. I'm going to see if I can learn how to actually do this. How do I actually get more listeners for my podcast without using social media ads? And what I learned is that you can do it. There is a way to actually pretty easily get more listeners for your podcast using social media. And what I've learned is that if we simply change the way we spend our time on social media, regardless of whether or not we're quote-unquote promoting our podcast, we could spend a fraction of the time on social media, 15, 30 minutes per day. If we change the way we spend our time on social media, our podcast audience can be regularly growing 25% per month. And in fact, many folks who have implemented the strategies I'm about to teach you in this episode of Grow the Show have seen their audience grow 50, 60, sometimes 100% or more per month while spending less time on social media. And I know it sounds too good to be true, but I guarantee this will work. So in this episode of Grow the Show, this one is a little bit different. It's going to be a little bit less produced. There is no guess. It is just me. And today I'm going to share with you my bread and butter framework for growing your podcast audience. And that is called Targeted Daily Engagement. I have built my entire business around TDE. I have grown two podcasts past five figures per month via TDE. And I can promise you, if done right, it will grow your podcast audience on average 25% per month. And so this episode of Grow the Show is actually taken from a session that we recently had on Clubhouse. So I'm lucky enough to be a moderator, a leader of ClubPod on Clubhouse, which is the largest podcast dedicated club on Clubhouse. And a couple of weeks ago, we had a session where I explained this, I explained how you can grow your podcast audience 25% per month on average, sometimes hide 60% per month while only spending 15 minutes a day on social media. And so we had an amazing session. We had about 200 attendees. And I shared with them exactly how you can do that. And I'm about to share with you right here right now the audio from that. So I cut out all of the Q&A at the end. I also cut out any references to the Clubhouse room. And so you know, this here is going to be a full-on explanation of how this works. It's not as edited. So if you're used to hear me super polished, like on the past episodes, this one's going to be a little bit more raw, but it is beginning to end in about 20 minutes, exactly how you can start to grow your podcast audience 60% per month or more on social media. So again, this is live from our session on Clubhouse. We have a Grow the Show room in ClubPod every Tuesday at 6 p.m. Eastern. So would love to have you there. You can ask me or any of my podcast expert friends that join me that week. Any questions about how to grow and monetize your podcast. But in the meantime, please enjoy this episode of Grow the Show that teaches you how you can grow your podcast audience 60% per month while spending only 15 minutes a day on social media. Here we go. This is Grow the Show, the podcast that helps you grow your podcast. My name is Kevin Schmidland and my mission is to discover and share how independent podcasters who don't already have a huge following or a huge budget can grow their audience and monetize their podcast into a thriving business. Today, I'm going to share with you my flagship framework for growing a podcast audience while only spending 15 minutes a day on social media. That framework is called Targeted Daily Engagement or TDE and it's coming at you right now on Grow the Show. Once again, real quick, my name is Kevin Schmidland. We are here at Club Pod and I am sharing with you today my framework on how to grow a podcast audience 25% per month average, usually it's much more. And before we talk about actually how to do that real quick, we have to take a second to understand how social media actually works and make social media work for us. So there's three things that you can really do on social media. Number one, you can consume which is what most of us do. That's when we spend all day scrolling TikToks, scrolling Instagram, you know, just kind of going through, going through, scroll, scroll. The second thing you can do is publish, which takes a ton of time and really doesn't grow your account. So if you're a podcaster, we're often publishing audiograms, maybe publishing video clips from, you know, a clip from our show. And these things take tons of time to put together, but they don't inherently actually grow your audience at all or grow your account at all because it doesn't get you new followers. It just gets shown to the people who already follow you, which if you're lucky is maximum 10% of the people who follow you. So if you let's say you have a thousand followers on Instagram and you post an audiogram promoting your podcast, you can reasonably, organically without paying to boost the post, only expect to reach one to 10% of those followers, which is 10 to 100 people. So what most podcasters are doing, unknowingly, because that's kind of what we're taught to do, is posting audiograms week after week. The follower count on the Instagram is not going up. And so the same 100 people are seeing those audiograms week after week. And that's why it's not getting us new listeners. So of the three things you can do on social media, consume is what most human beings do all day every day, hours and hours per week, publish, which is what a lot of podcasters do in an effort to get new listeners, but it's not working. The third thing is what actually gets people to discover you, and that is to engage. And it sounds simple and it's like, duh, of course, but this is what most people don't do on social media. But that's it. We're just going to engage on social media. And so what I'm about to outline, there's basically four points that we want to hit in our engagement week after week. We want to do it 15 minutes a day. We're going to set a minimum and a maximum. And this is what gets us new podcast listeners week in and week out. And so a couple prerequisites first, number one, this is not going to work if you don't have a really specific understanding of who your target listener is. A lot of podcasters, and this we could have a whole other session about this. And I'm happy to answer questions about it. But you know, a lot of podcasters, when I say who's your target listener will say something vague like entrepreneurs or women in tech or baseball fans or something like that. And when we're just starting out if we're building our audience from scratch, that's that's not specific enough. So number one, we want to have a really, really specific idea of who our target listener is. That's not to say that the podcast isn't going to work for other people. It's just the people that we're going to go out and get at first a really, really specific idea. Number two, prerequisite to making social media work for you for your podcast. Social media is built to be a time suck. So we want to do our best to unfollow and mute any accounts that aren't giving us massive value in our day today. So that means, you know, the people that we went to high school with that we didn't really even talk to when we were in high school. But we still see pictures of their kids three times a week. We want to get that stuff out of our feed so that it doesn't distract us from what we're doing. And then number three is we want to set up all of our social media profiles to direct people to the podcast as quickly and as easily as possible. And so a lot of podcasters will have a bio that has a bunch of stuff in it, a bunch of links, a bunch of on the host of this and the founder of that and the this of that. And while that's cool to show that you're a multi passionate individual who has a bunch of credentials, it actually doesn't drive somebody who discovers your social media profile to check out your podcast because there's just kind of too many links. They're like, oh, that's cool. They do a lot of stuff. And then they kind of leave. But if your profile says, I am the host of this podcast, it's amazing. This is what we do. You should check it out right now. When they do discover your profile, they are going to click on that link and check out your podcast. So those are a couple of prerequisites there. So how do we actually grow our podcast audience up to 25% on average per month, spending only 15 minutes of social media a day. You choose 15 to 30 minutes a day, decide how much you want it to vote to this and schedule it on your calendar, treat it like a meeting with somebody else. Let's say you do your targeted daily engagement or TDE at noon. Then if someone says, Hey, can we meet at noon? You say, Hey, sorry, I'm busy. I have a commitment at that time. And so we choose that 15 to 30 minute time block each day. We block it out. And what we do is we go on social media and we actually go out and engage with our future listeners with our future dream guests, with our future sponsors and with the people who have already aggregated our target audience. So journalists, other podcasters, influencers, those types of folks. And I'm going to break down exactly how to do this type of engagement in a moment. But the idea is that we want to be on social media actually being social, right, commenting, leaving thoughtful comments, thoughtful responses, celebrating people's wins, answering questions, sharing our opinions, and not just liking and commenting emojis and commenting, yes, needed this today or stuff like that. That stuff isn't what gets our future listeners to discover us. What does is to go out to find them and to just be awesome and comment on their stuff and help them with something. And then what they're going to do is they're going to click on your profile. And because you've set up your social media profile to drive people to your podcast, they're going to check out the show. And it sounds super simple and it sounds too good to be true. But if you took the time that you're spending now making audiograms are just like spending so, so, so much time creating social media content, we don't want to stop publishing. But if we just take a little bit of that time and put it towards actually going out and engaging with our future listeners and our future guests and our future, you know, the people who are going to feature us in the media and stuff like that, it will go so, so far in growing your podcast right now without spending much time. In fact, you actually probably spend less time on social media and your show will be growing and it'll be much easier to get new listeners and actually to monetize as well. So how do we do it? What is targeted daily engagement? So there's basically four pieces to this. Two of them are engaging with your future listeners out in the wild of social media and two of them are engaging with the people who are going to introduce you to more future listeners in the future. And so I'll start with the first one. And so the first way to go get new listeners online on social media totally free is to go to what we call the watering holes. This is a concept that was developed by Alex Hillman in Amy Hoy of stacking the bricks. They developed it in the sense of sales and finding new customers, but we do it in the sense of finding new podcast listeners. And a watering hole is basically anywhere online where your future listeners are already going to interact with each other. So let's say, for example, you have a show about coffee, right? You have a podcast about coffee. Well, there are Facebook groups and subreddits and online forums and yes, clubhouse rooms that are about coffee. And so if you want more people who are interested in coffee and who might be interested in a coffee podcast to listen to your coffee podcast, you go online where those people are already going to interact about coffee. But here's the thing. You do not go there and post about your podcast. That's what most people do. Because yes, of course, yeah, if I want to find coffee people, I go to Facebook groups where there are, you know, that are about coffee. But the mistake that most people make is they join the group, they check a box that says, I agree, not to be self-promote in this group. And then they join the group and say, Hey, everyone, check out my podcast. There's a new episode this week, which is self-promote, which breaks the rules and makes everyone angry. And if you're lucky, you won't get kicked out of the group. So how do you do it? How do you join a Facebook group and actually get more listeners? Well, the key is not to promote. The key is to participate in these Facebook groups, in these clubhouse rooms, in these subreddits and online forums. You just go there and actually join the community, answer questions, celebrate their wins, share your opinion, share their take, your take. It sounds simple. But just by showing up in a community, a couple minutes a day and actually participating without asking anything in return, people are going to flock to your profile. And since you have positioned your profile to drive people to your podcast, they're going to be like, Oh, wow, Catherine is really, really knowledgeable about coffee. And she's got a coffee podcast. I'm going to check that out. It sounds simple. But this is one of the most powerful things you can do. One extra pro tip is that when you do get to the watering holes, help out the moderators or admins. So every Facebook group has admins. Every subreddit has mods. Every clubhouse club or clubhouse room has mods. Those people who are the mods are already serving the audience that you want to serve. So if you DM them, you can say, Hey, I see that you serve people who love coffee. I love coffee. I have a podcast about coffee. Do you have any advice? Or is there any way that I could help you serve this group? You don't ask them to share your podcast. They will do that for you if you don't ask. It's crazy. And so you just be helpful. And if you just literally make a list of 25 Facebook groups today and join them, I guarantee you that in 10 of them at least because some of them, some not all Facebook groups are great. But I guarantee you that 10 of those 25s are going to be amazing communities that if you just join them and actually start participating, people will start to collaborate with you. People start, we'll start to check out your podcast without you asking them to. And that's part one is just the watering holes. This alone, I had a client named Anna, who joined my podcast accelerator in July. And she has had on average over six months, 25% download growth. When she joined, she had a thousand downloads per month. Now she's over 4,000 per month. And some months, her audience grew 60% just by participating in the watering hole. She's a time management coach for women. Her show is called It's About Time. And she just joins these groups and helps people, you know, helps women manage their time. And then she gets invited on podcasts and people check out her show and they check out her profile and her listener rates have skyrocketed. The other place to do targeted daily engagement where you go out and find your future listeners and just interact and be awesome. You'd be the life of the party is again, quite simply on hashtags. On Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, if you just identify 10 hashtags where your future listeners are currently already identifying themselves. So if you have a coffee podcast, hashtag, coffee lover, hashtag, home barista, stuff like that. You go to their posts and just find 10 posts each day that are interesting and leave your two cents. This is the dollar 80 method that Gary Ve invented. He says to pick 90 posts and leave your two cents. I think that's a lot. So I say just do 10 and pick 10 posts, leave your two cents, comment something thoughtful and non-generic. And those people are going to check out your profile and they're going to check out your podcast. So those are the two ways to go out and get new listeners on social media. It sounds super simple to just go to Facebook groups. But again, most people who are trying to promote their podcasts go and they promote instead of participating. We're going to participate, not promote, and our participation will promote. It's crazy. It's a subtle shift, but it goes a long way. The other piece, like we said, is hashtags. And so that's half of targeted daily engagement, blown through it real quick right now. I could make a whole seminar out of this. But that is how you go get new listeners, one on one, where every single day, 15 minutes a day, this stuff adds up. It compounds like interest in an investment account. It's been 15 minutes a day, market on your calendar, go into Facebook groups, go into clubhouse rooms, go onto hashtags, and simply engage with people thoughtfully without asking anything in return. And listeners will flock to your podcast. The other half of targeted daily engagement is where we go to build relationships with the people who have already assembled our future audience. That's going to be our dream guests, right? So thought leaders, influencers, that's going to be journalists that can include reporters, so traditional journalists, but it's also bloggers and other podcasters. You're a journalist as a podcaster. And so if the first half of targeted daily engagement we're going out and we're just interacting day in and day out with our future listeners and having them discover us by us just being awesome on the internet, the other half is digging the well of relationships before we're thirsty and building an online relationship with the people who we want to have on our podcast someday. And so the first half I call dream collaborators and the second half I call journalists. So the first half dream collaborators, these are the 50 to 100 people who it would be a dream for us to have on our podcast, right? The people that it's like, oh my gosh, if they were on the show, it would just change everything for us. Well most podcasters actually put that date that they could, you know, that they deserve to have that guest farther out than it needs to be. And the other thing that most podcasters do is eventually wait till some time and then cold pitch that dream guest. But if you make that list of people now, 50 doesn't have to be 100, 100's better, but 50 to 100 people, Russell Branson calls them the dream 100 people who it would be a dream to collaborate with. If we simply make a list of those people and we follow them on social media and interact with their posts, thoughtfully, again, not something, not just putting fire emojis or, you know, the 100 simple or something like that, we comment thoughtfully on the stuff that they post. If we do that day in and day out, here's what's going to happen. They're going to start to recognize your name and recognize you as a member of their community. And they're probably going to interact with you. This is one piece of targeted daily engagement that you could potentially see result in before I'm done talking right now. It's insane. And that can feel like meaningless, but these are the real people behind the accounts. So no matter how many followers they have, those people are operating those accounts. And so they see that. And if you start to interact with them day in and day out, just comment on their stuff and be awesome without asking them for anything. Then when the day comes that you do want to pitch them to be on your podcast and you do want to ask them to collaborate with you, they're all in because they know that you're awesome because they've interacted with you online. Again, this goes so, so, so far and digging the well before with Thursday is key. One of my listeners of the podcast, Ena Coveney, started doing this, started doing targeted daily engagement with her dream guests. And she now has her dream guests pitching her to be on her podcast. It's called the global phenomenon. It's for online coaches. Her first two episodes were with John Lee Dumas and Pat Flynn. And she hasn't looked back just because she has been actually interacting with these folks online before the time comes to pitch them on their podcast. So part number one of TDE targeted daily engagement is to go to the watering holes, Facebook groups, clubhouse rooms, go where your future listeners are already going for the content that you want to give them. And don't promote participate thoughtfully. That's all. If you've set up your social media profile so that it points them directly to the podcast, they're going to check out your show. The second half is on hashtags and social media. The third half is with your dream 100, interacting every single day. And then the fourth bit is the same thing, but with journalists, journalists are people who have access to your future listeners in mass. And so those are the people who are podcasters, who are bloggers, who are reporters, who are editors, producers, those types of folks. And we do the same thing with them that we do with our dream 100. We just identify them, make a list of 20, 20 people like, let's say that you are, we'll go with a coffee example. You have a podcast about coffee. Well, let's go to Google News and look for articles about the coffee industry. Find 10 really good ones. Look at who wrote the article. Let's say it's in, I don't know, Forbes. They will list who wrote the article and their Twitter and LinkedIn accounts. So you just go and you follow them and share the article that you just read and enjoyed and tag the creator, not the outlet. And you'll have started to build a relationship with them. And if you do that, what I do is every single Friday, take a look at the podcast industry and see what new articles that have come out on Google News. And anytime I see an article with a journalist who's new to me, I follow them on Instagram and I just start interacting like if they tweet something, I'll reply. The engagement piece of social media is what the vast majority of business owners and podcasters skip. Everyone thinks that you just publish, publish, publish, publish, publish, publish, and then your audience will grow. But the true reality is if you engage, engage, engage, you won't be able to hold your audience back. So targeted daily engagement is when we spend 15 to 30 minutes every single day doing one of those four things, engaging with future listeners and watering holes, engaging with future listeners on hashtags, engaging with dream guests and collaborators in the comments of their posts and engaging with journalists by sharing and commenting their work. And so that's it. That's all you have to do. If you do that 15 minutes a day, give it one week, better to give it 90 days, but give it one week. And I guarantee you by just engaging on social media a couple minutes per day, you're going to start to see your followers should go up and your download numbers go up because most of us are just publishing instead of engaging. Now just a couple of things, if your TDE is not working, like so let's say two weeks or now you've been doing it 15 minutes every day and it's not working, that could mean a couple of things. Number one, it could be that we're not specific enough with our target listener. You really do want to get super specific to the point where you have the thought, hmm, I think that this audience might be too small. Once you have that thought, that's when you just started getting specific enough with your audience. The internet is a very, very big place and you'd be surprised how much room there is for something that's super, super niche. Even if your topic is broad, you can still start with a niche to really just be that core audience that you just completely delight and then they will carry you the rest of the way till having a large audience. So that's number one, targeting might be too broad. Number two is your targeting might be right but you just haven't found the right places yet. I've seen it where podcasters find 25 Facebook groups to go engage in the watering holes. And sometimes the first 25 Facebook groups that Facebook gives you when you search for coffee, people who like coffee, sometimes they're not good Facebook groups. Maybe they have too many people in them and it's not much of a community. So you do want to keep looking. Number three, there might be too much friction in your profile. So if you're trying to get podcast listeners and your profile says I'm the founder of this, the co-founder of that, the host of this, the host of that, a mom, a dad and all these different things, then people are not going to immediately click on one thing. And so it is best to focus your profile one at a time. And then the fourth piece is you might not actually be being thoughtful in your engagement. We want quality over quantity. If you can leave 10 thoughtful comments on the posts on Instagram or in a Facebook group that a future listener has made, I guarantee you think about how quickly that will add up in seven days that's F and D potential listeners, which may not seem like a lot to some folks. But when you're starting out, that seems like that, that can be a ton. So wrapping up, I make everyone that I work with in podcasting do this for 90 days with no exceptions, no goose eggs. You must do at least one minute of targeted daily engagement every single day for 90 days. And then most of them see their podcast numbers and their social media follow accounts double within the first month and continue to grow on average 25% per month, even if they stop releasing episodes. And so what's cool about this is that your audience will grow, but also you're going to just be a better podcaster because you're going to better understand what your audience wants, loves, and needs. And finally, with that understanding, it's going to be way easier for you to monetize your show because monetization is all about having a really specific and solid relationship with your listener. So that is my framework target of deal engagement. I have built my entire career off of this. That is how we grow podcasts. My name is Kevin Schmidland on the hosts of the Grow the Show podcast where I and that's where I share other lessons like this. This has been a live recording of an episode of the Grow the Show podcast. It's going to be about 20 minutes long. I'm trying out this new solo episode style. And this is Club Pod. So real quick before I bring some folks on stage, if you have a question for me, I'm going to we've also got a couple awesome folks in the group here who if they're willing could certainly answer questions as well. So let's get those hands up if you have questions. Thank you to Club Pod for having us on. So there you have it. That is how you can grow your podcast audience 60% per month or more. If you have any questions about how to do this, please, please, please join us in the Grow the Show Facebook group where I will be happy to answer any questions that you have about how to grow your audience. We've got the community up to about 300 super amazing podcasters and we are in there every single day helping each other grow. And so please join us there. The link is in the show notes. I'd be happy to answer any questions that have come up through this session. And yes, once again, if you want to join us on Club House for these sessions where you can ask questions right then and there with me and other podcasting experts, we are there every Tuesday as 6 p.m. Eastern as a part of Club Pod, the largest Club House Club dedicated to podcasts. Finally one more thing before we roll the credits. If you found any value in this episode and you're listening on Apple podcasts, please, please, please right here now leave us a five star rating and a review. It really, really does work to bring big name podcasters on to the show. It doesn't really do much to get more listeners, but it will definitely get us bigger podcasters who will see that plenty of people listen to the show and get value from it. So once again, thank you so much. My name is Kevin Schmidland. This episode was Associate Produced by Catherine Nils with Post Protection by Max Graham. My name is Kevin Schmidland. This is Grow the Show and we will see you next week.