In this day and age of social media, it may seem smart to have your presence be felt across its many platforms. After all, the wider you cast your net, the more you can attract, right? But what if we tell you that this is not wise advice all of the time, especially when you are still starting out as a podcaster? In this episode, Tom Hazzard and Tracy Hazzard discuss why you should begin your podcast social media promotion on only one platform. They give great advice and recommendations for new podcasters, sharing real-life examples from their shows. At the heart of it, it is about knowing who your audience is. Join this conversation and gain valuable insights on spreading your message and growing your brand!

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Why Should You Begin Your Podcast Social Media Promotion On Only One Platform?

In this episode, we’re going to talk about starting on social media with your podcast. Social media for podcasters, we can go down a very deep rabbit hole there. This is going to be a narrow topic for just starting. Right, Tracy?

No, it’s not for just starting. It’s for starting out promoting your podcast on social media. I want to be clear on this, it’s not for just starting on social media as a podcast.

No, I meant promoting your show. Maybe I didn’t state that very well.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing social media for quite some time or you’re an expert at Instagram or TikTok or wherever you are. This is about if you’re starting your podcast and you’ve never used podcasting in social media as part of your content or promotion strategy with social media. This is our recommendation for this. Why we recommend one channel is what we’re talking about in this episode.

There are two whole gigantic workshops we did that are going to be added to the show episode so you’ll be able to link through to watch those videos. They’re 60 to 90-minute workshops that we did with our clients that I’m happy to share with all of you, Feed Your Brand readers. You’re going to get the bonus of being able to access that because it’s not readily available. We’re going to have that in this episode.

We did one that’s a social media starter, assuming that you’ve not done social media before. The second one is advanced social media, which is a more advanced concept than what we’re going to talk about here. One of the controversial things that we’ve had a lot of debate about is why we only choose and recommend on social media. We’ve come up against and got a lot of clients who have social media advisors or coaches who are urging them to do it all and do it everywhere. We say, “I don’t recommend that.”

 

 

I have pushback. I don’t know how many times clients push back on us on this. We only recommend doing one social media channel to start with when you are promoting your podcast episodes. You can say, “I’ve got a podcast everywhere on social media.” It’s no different from you promoting your course, your book and things that you normally would promote in the course and everything. Let everybody know you have a podcast. There’s no question about that. Do that everywhere.

However, when you’re starting and you don’t know what’s going to resonate with your audience yet, we recommend doing only one social media as the focus of it. It doesn’t mean you can’t re-share on other social media but we want you to start with one focus only on how you’re going to format your content, how you’re going to test it out and what you’re going to do with this.

An example of this is I’m going to start with LinkedIn because that’s an easy one, and it’s where a lot of you, business podcasters, will start with. I guarantee you. If I’m promoting a podcast episode and I’ve decided that LinkedIn is the one thing and my primary that I’m going to focus on first, then I’m going to make a decision. How many days of the week am I going to post there?

I post 5 days a week and sometimes 7, but 5 days a week is my commitment and then if I have extra things to promote during the week, I’ll promote 7, and that might be because we did a workshop or we did something extra special that week. I’ll go to seven days just so that I don’t mess up my normal posting schedule.

I’ve got five days a week that I’m going to post. I post twice a day. Not everybody does. You can choose to do one. I’m going to use the example here one time a day. If I’ve got 5 days a week and I’ve got a podcast episode that I want to promote once a day every day over the course of those 5 days, I want to use a different format of content and test it out on each day of the week.

 

 

On Monday, I might post what we call internally here as Ego Bait™, which is the graphic quote image. It’s a testimonial about why our guest was so great on our show or what’s so amazing about them that we had our guests. Essentially, it’s an announcement that says this wonderful guest is on the show and here’s why. It’s a graphic image with a post that goes along with it with a tag to tag the guest so that they know that I’m promoting their episode. I might do that both in the post and in the comment. I’ve tested out what we call the Ego Bait™, the quote graphic about the guest.

On day two, I want to post a video clip. I’ll do a video meme. It’ll be under two minutes for absolute certainty. If my focus were TikTok or Instagram, I would make it under one minute like it would be my focus but because it’s LinkedIn I can go a little bit longer. I might go under two minutes. It’s about a 1 to 2-minute video meme clip. There is zero branding. I don’t brand it with my podcast episode. I don’t do anything about it until maybe the end clip. It might finish the clip and then end with an image of my cover art that says, “Read the whole episode here,” and it will have The Binge Factor, Feed Your Brand or whatever that is.

I don’t do any branding though on it. There’s captioning on it, and that captioning is built in by my team and by us, by Podetize. We don’t do that auto-captioning from LinkedIn because I don’t want them to get it wrong. If they don’t know the terminology and if you use the auto-captioning on any of the social media channels, 9 times out of 10, they’re going to get your industry language wrong, which is something you don’t want to have to happen on your video clips.

Day 1 was the graphic, day 2 is the video meme, and day 3 might be more of what you would call a Story if you were doing Instagram where it’s a quote graphic of something I said on the show, a quote graphic of something the guest said at the show and the cover art for the episode, a graphic of what the episode title was. It runs like a video because the video does so well so we create it into a video but it’s only a rotation of three graphics with maybe a little voiceover but probably not. It’s probably just the three graphics themselves and the post that I create for it that links to the episode blog, not to the podcast on Apple or Spotify. That’s day three.

On day four, I’ll go back to something where I’ve clipped a video clip of the guest for that and I want to hear what the guest had to say, the advice that the guest gave. This is another guest promotion on day four. It is a video meme but that video meme and the whole post have the tag for the guest. It’s focused on what they said that was so tremendously important. We will quote what was said in the clip. This one usually could even be 30 seconds and we’ll quote out the quote of what they said in the post itself.

 

 

Even though the video’s there with what it says, we’ve physically quoted it in the post itself. That’s day four. We don’t do Monday through Friday. We offset it and it’s usually Sunday through Thursday. That’s our model of it just because of how we do it but that’s our choice because we know how our LinkedIn runs. That’s why I’m saying day 1, day 2, day 3 to day 5 here.

Day five is a, “What did you miss?” Typically, we might run a video carousel idea of graphics of different episodes that they missed over the course of the last 4 weeks or this new episode grouped with 2 other episodes that are related to it that might be interesting about the topic. It’s what you missed out on because you’re not listening to The Binge Factor or you’re not getting your tactics and tips from the show. That’s how we do it. That’s our weekly focus.

Here’s the thing. We’ve dialed this in. We know that this works. We used to have audiograms in the place where I am featuring the video meme from the guest. Those audiograms don’t work. To test out and make sure it wasn’t the fact that maybe Thursdays at 1:00 PM doesn’t work well, we put something that we knew was working video memes, put it into the Thursday slot and test it out.

What we found was that video memes worked five times better than when we were using the audiogram. If you do this across too many social media channels and you’re playing, you have no pure design of experiment to test out what type of content works with your audience, what type of content works for the channel that you’re utilizing and is it the day and the time? There are too many variables in it.

This is why we come back to recommending one social channel that is your main focus for it and dialing it in there, getting it right and working on it. We recommend doing this for at least 90 days so at least 3 months. However, if you’re new to social media, you don’t have all the data on the best time of day to post and things like that so you’re not starting with the best information, to begin with, because it’s brand new to you, you may need to wait six months total.

 

If you’re posting daily episodes, this is much more complicated. This is for someone who is doing a weekly show and I want to be clear on this. If you’re doing a daily show, this gets a whole lot more complex in terms of the number of posts that you have to make per day, the episode rotation and what you’re doing. Watch that advanced social media that I told you about because we did talk about ways to do that and ways to handle multiple episodes at once and things like that.

This is why we recommend one because you need to experiment. Even if you’re great at LinkedIn and you’ve been amazing at it, you need to understand how your podcast is being shared with that audience so it’s translating into new listeners and new engagement from those listeners, like, “How that is working for you and what you can do about it?”

You can’t do that if you’re spreading yourself too thin, doing it everywhere at once. You find out one thing’s working over here and another thing’s working over at this other social channel. It’s confusing things for you. What I recommend is one social channel. Pick the one that has the most obvious audience for you. For us, it’s business to business. LinkedIn’s the most obvious for us. That’s why I chose it as the example here but for you, it might be TikTok, Instagram or Twitter.

It doesn’t matter which it is. Just decide that primary because you know that channel well because you already know you connect with the audience there. You’ve seen what’s resonated before when you’ve used it before or you are testing out the idea of, “This is where I think my audience is. Let’s see if they’re there.” That’s your test as well. Tom, you are a novice to social media. You don’t do the posting here. I do most of it. Doesn’t that make sense to pick one channel?

It does make complete sense and it’s precisely because it’s overwhelming. I use social media. I don’t use it that much in business. We have someone on our team that logs into LinkedIn and makes posts for me. Even posts that say they’re from me, I don’t do them.

You need to understand how your podcast is being shared with that audience so it's translating into new listeners. Click To Tweet

They don’t log in. We use a third-party buffer or Meet Edgar.

When they’re scheduling those or if they need me to do something, they give it to me and say, “Here. Copy this, paste this into LinkedIn and post it, please.” I’ll do that. It’s fair to me what makes the most sense because I understand complexities, systems, processes and things that if you engage in more than one social media channel at a time and you don’t yet know what’s going to work and what’s not going to work.

If you have too many variables going on at one time or if you change more than one thing at a time, you’re not going to go, “Which one of those 2 or 3 things I changed is what made the difference and worked?” You’ve got to approach this methodically so that you get a proper feedback loop and know whether something’s working or not. I don’t think any of us need busy time posting things on social media because we don’t have enough to do in our lives. We want to spend time and learn what works so that we can get more awareness for our shows. The tough thing is that it is so different for everybody and your subject matter too.

There are so many variables and that’s why we want to narrow those variables down. It doesn’t mean you can’t share that everywhere. It means that the creation, the focus of what you’re deciding and what you’re testing and watching starts with that one social channel only. If you are only going to post once a week, post once a week there. It doesn’t matter and then re-share that on Instagram or TikTok. Re-share it in the other places on the other days of the week.

This is my other recommendation to you if you are going to re-share the same content. If I’m going to do video memes on Tuesday, I’m not going to do video memes on Tuesday on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook. I’m going to do video memes on Tuesday on LinkedIn because it’s my primary and I’m testing it out.

 

I’m going to do that video meme on Wednesday on Instagram, Thursday on TikTok, Friday on Twitter, Saturday on Facebook or whatever it is. I might send Instagram and Facebook on the same day. I might do that because they auto-post to each other. You see what I’m doing with that is offsetting it so that in case people are following me everywhere, they don’t get the same thing on the same day at the same time.

You’re mixing it up and you want to have a plan. That’s where using a tool like Buffer, Meet Edgar or something like that is very helpful because you can schedule that video meme to go live on LinkedIn on Tuesday and another one Wednesday and another one on Thursday. You also can do the same thing with each of them. You may have five different pieces of content you’re sharing. Each goes out each day but to a different social platform and you mix it up.

What we do again is come back at the 90 days or at the 6-month mark, whatever it is that is right for you. We take a look at what was resonating and working. We make one major change at a time. We change either the day or the times or the type of content because we see something’s not working. We remove audiograms but we leave the date and time intact. We’re not changing too many variables at once because then we have a false failure or a false success. We don’t understand what worked. We try to change one variable at a time.

That’s words to the wise, Tracy. We risk going down a deeper rabbit hole if we continue on this topic. We wanted a narrow topic for this episode.

The workshops will do the heavy lifting for a lot of the other things. The last thing though that I do want to leave you with is if your coaches or team pushes back on you. They say, “No. We can do this everywhere at once.” Remember that you are new to podcasting. Creating a great podcast needs to be your focus or no one will continue to listen.

Creating a great podcast needs to be your focus, or no one will continue to listen. Click To Tweet

It won’t be sustainable and you will be wasting your time. If you switch your focus from that podcast to having to do everything on social media, it’s too much too soon until you’re sure your content, process and audience are working. All of those things are working with your podcast as a whole. This is also another reason why we say to only work on one thing at a time.

Concentrate on your podcast and take the five things, in this case, that Podetize does for you if you’re using our done-for-you production services or model them. If you’re going to do it yourself, that’s fine. Take those things. Figure out how to share them each week on one platform. That’s the process flow right there. When you get that right, measure it.

Take a look at it in 90 days or 6 months. Set up a time for yourself that you’re comfortable with and then look both at, “How did my podcast do during that period? Was I great? Am I getting good feedback on the content of what I’m producing? Is this working on social media? What’s not working?” Let’s make that one adjustment at a time. Go every 30 days and make a small adjustment.

Tracy, after that one social platform, you have that figured out at least to a level. It’s not that you aren’t going to make changes and course-correct them as time goes on. Once you have that one figured out, then you can layer in social platform two.

You’ll make different decisions because TikTok is a different platform. Maybe you need shorter clips over there. You might decide on platform two that you’re going to take pieces of what worked but you’re going to mess with it a little bit because this platform and audience are a little bit different in what they accept from content. That’s where you’ll play with that as well. If you have no information and no doubt you’re going to take exactly what you did in LinkedIn, you’ll move it to TikTok. When you figure out what’s not working there after three months, then you’ll go, “Let’s make an adjustment.” That’s how we do it.

I hope everyone got some good value out of that. Thank you so much for reading. There are many more great topics like this within our episodes of the show. Thanks for reading, everybody.

 

Important Links

• Buffer
• Meet Edgar
• Podetize