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Once you’ve recorded and finalized your podcast, it really feels like the hard work is done. But without an effective social media marketing strategy, your hard work on the podcast itself might go to waste. Living in the digital age means that social media has to be at the heart of your marketing efforts. This is the only way to build hype, momentum and interest around your content.
To maximize your exposure and increase your number of listeners, you need to harness social media as much as possible. To do this, you need to know what an effective podcast social media strategy looks like. Luckily, that’s what this blog post is all about.
In this article, you’ll find all sorts of tips and tricks for properly promoting your podcast on social media.
Why should you use social media for promoting a podcast?
There are so many reasons that you should be using social media for promoting your podcast. The baseline is that social media is the key to maximizing reach and increasing the number of listeners you get on your content. Let’s break it down a bit:
- Social media is the core of your podcast community. Podcasts are blessed with loyal and captive audiences. If you can activate your listeners properly on social media, this is a surefire way to cultivate a community around your podcast.
- Maximize reach. Promoting your podcast on social media is the best way to ensure every new episode attracts both existing and new listeners.
- Create excitement and traction. Using social media as part of your marketing strategy is really important for creating momentum and anticipation for your episode releases.
- Reach into your podcast guests’ communities. If you invite guests onto your podcast, you should most definitely have a strategy in place for harnessing their existing followers too.
- Establish a brand presence and name. Finally, using social media for your podcast is essential for building out a brand name and presence over time. This feeds into creating a community but also for elevating the credibility of the content you’re creating.
How to promote your podcast on social media: 4 Strategies to try
Create short-form video clips
If there’s one thing you do, it should be creating short-form video clips of your podcast. This helps you harness the short-form wave that’s happening right now and create visually engaging teasers of the full-length podcast.
The reason to invest in creating short-form video is simple. Viewers are far more likely to watch and stick with short-form content. Drop offs are inevitable for viewer with no commitment to a full-length video. Meanwhile, short-form teasers give your audience a bite-sized taster of your full podcast episodes. This empowers them to choose whether they want to watch the whole thing.
This means using clips is a great way to promote new episodes ahead of their release and once you publish them. Plus, you can create clips and post them across several social media platforms (TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram reels). Harnessing Riverside’s Magic Clips feature, you don’t even need to carve out an extra stage in your video production process. Magic Clips does all the hard work for you by automatically identifying and creating short-form clips from your episode’s key moments.
Make sure to always include captions on any videos that you post to social media. This ensures you catch viewers’ attention even if they’re scrolling past with their audio turned off.
Example: This clip from the British podcast “The Rest is Politics”
Audio clips
In a similar way, audio clips or ‘audiograms’ are an effective way to promote your podcast. Especially on Twitter, for example, which isn’t focused solely on video content. Audiograms are another form of bite-sized teaser for your content. But instead of short video clips, they’re brief soundbites.
Example: David Tenant’s podcast uses animated audiograms on Instagram and Twitter.
Quotes
Another way to promote your podcast is to pull interesting quotes and make them up into an instagram post, Thread or Tweet. This is a nice way to give your followers a taste of the conversation or topic for the upcoming episode without giving too much away.
Example: This quote post by Serial podcasts
Tag and collaborate with podcast guests
Whatever content you’re using to promote your podcast, you should tap into your podcast guests’ communities. This means encouraging them to post about the upcoming episode and share all the clips and teasers you upload.
Include your audience in your podcast
Another way to promote your podcast on social media before your episode comes out is to engage with your audience. You can ask your followers for topics they want to see covered or questions they want to ask your guest for that week. This is an effective way of including your listeners in the entire podcast process.
Tools to help you streamline promoting your podcast on social media
You want your podcast social media strategy and content creation to slot in seamlessly with the rest of your workflow. That’s why your choice of tools is so important. You should be working with intuitive and innovative tools that make your life less complicated while still helping you ace your social media game.
Riverside
Riverside is a video creation platform that has a whole array of powerful features that will support your social media efforts.
Firstly, Riverside’s highly accurate AI transcription makes it easier than ever to create captions for your social media videos. As soon as you’ve wrapped your recording, Riverside automatically generates a transcription that’s ready for use.
You can also edit your videos together quickly and effectively using Riverside’s text-based editor. Use your transcript to make immediate changes to your recording: delete words or phrases in your transcript and Riverside will get rid of the corresponding audio. Quickly search and navigate your recording by searching for key terms.
The AI powered Magic Clips tool saves you substantial time when it comes to creating short-form content. Once you click on the ‘Magic Clips’ button, it automatically identifies key moments and transforms them into short-form clips for social media. You can add customizable captions and make small edits if you want to before exporting them to post on your socials.
Best for: podcasters looking to integrate their social media content creation strategy into their podcasting workflow. Perfect for creating short-form clips alongside your regular content.
Headliner
Headliner is an app that’s all about helping you promote your podcast. It’s a perfect solution for creating audiograms and short-form clips for social media. It also includes a transcription feature, but only for 10 minutes per month on the free plan. Headliner also offers templates for quick, easy, yet professional videos and audiograms.
Best for: Podcasters looking for a promotional video maker.
Social media scheduler
Everyone has their own preferences when it comes to social media schedulers. But the point is that you definitely need one.
Using a social media scheduler helps you to consolidate your uploading and posting workflows and saves you time in the long-run. You can bulk upload and schedule and get a clear overview of what your posting schedule looks like in the coming days, weeks or even months.
A lot of these tools also have other features and integrations such as analytics, newsletters and more. If you haven’t chosen a social media scheduler yet, we’d recommend considering budget, usability and integrations.
Best for: Podcasters who want to get ahead of the game when it comes to refining and executing their social media promotion strategy.
Buffer
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Buffer says it’s the most popular social media scheduler in the UK. It lets you schedule your posts, visualize how your content will look on your feeds, track and analyze your content performance.
later.com
Later.com helps you to automate your social media tasks and admin. You also get access to their “Linkin.bio” feature that allows you to include multiple URLs in your Instagram bio. You can also use their analytics tools to measure your content’s reach and performance. Later.com also has a range of content creation features that help to streamline your workflows.
Hubspot
HubSpot is more than just a social media scheduler, although this is one of its key functionalities. HubSpot is a CRM platform that can act as your marketing, sales, service, CMS and operations hub all-in-one. In terms of its social media scheduling capabilities, you can schedule your posts and track your performance.
Canva
Canva is an all-in-one design and visual communication tool. You can use it to create branded and cohesive social assets. This is a great platform for use across your podcasting brand beyond social media too. Canva comes loaded with a number of intuitive tools and free-to-use templates and icons.
Best for: Podcasters who want to create a cohesive brand identity with an easy-to-use tool.
Linktree
Linktree might seem like a niche tool, but for instagram it’s a must-have. It’s not possible to include links in instagram captions, which is why you’ll often see people write “link in bio”. Linktree allows you to include multiple links in your bio instead of instagram’s standard limit of one. This is hugely necessary if you want your followers to be able to find an episode you’ve referred to in a previous post.
Best for: Podcasters who want to ensure their instagram followers can find their way to their podcast content easily.
What is the best social media platform to promote a podcast?
The frustrating answer is that there is no single best social media platform for promoting your podcast. In fact, if you want to maximize the returns you get on your social strategy you should be posting to multiple. Here are some of the pros and cons of each major social media platform:
Instagram is a visually-based social media platform that revolves around photos and short videos. Following TikTok and YouTube’s short-form video trend, Instagram released Reels. Reels best for reaching new audiences, but you can also post photos, or create informative carousels for your podcast.
Pros:
- You can post content in different formats making this an ideal choice for those who don’t have as much video or visual materials.
- Good in-app analytics
Cons:
- Not able to include links in captions
- An aesthetically pleasing feed is more of an expectation here than on other platfroms
Best for: Podcasters who are keen to build a community and brand reputation.
What to post: You should post a mix of image based content and short-form videos to maximize your exposure and reach.
YouTube (Shorts)
You might be familiar with YouTube as a long-form video format, but their short-form TikTok and Reel contender “Shorts” gives you the perfect medium for marketing your podcast.
Pros:
- Can feed traffic into an existing YouTube podcast channel where you’re posting your full-length podcast to YouTube already.
- Has over 2 billion users, so you’re tapping into a large audience.
Cons:
- You’re limited to video content, so if you don’t record video another platform may be better
- If you don’t have a YouTube presence it might not make sense to post there
Best for: Podcasters who post their full-length content regularly to YouTube.
What to post: Short-form video clips that give your viewers a taste of your full-length episodes.
TikTok
TikTok is a social media platform that’s based solely on short-form videos. The platform has well over a billion users and is particularly popular among Gen Z and millennials.
Pros
- Huge potential reach
- Content is less polished, so you don’t have to spend as much effort making the perfect aesthetic
Cons:
- Younger demographic of users which might not be a good fit for your target audience
- Video only platform
Best for: Podcasters with a younger audience, who want to create more natural content to reach a wider audience.
What to post: Short-form clips and videos that relate to your podcast.
Twitter, or “X” as it’s now known, centers around quick and short text posts. You can post videos and images as well, but the focus is on short-bites of information, and sparking conversations.
Pros:
- Good for asking your audience for questions, thoughts and responses
- The text focus can work better for audio-only podcasts that don’t have as many video materials.
Cons:
- Since its rebrand to “X”, there is some uncertainty about the future of the app
- Character limit is characteristic of the app but can be frustrating
- Not really image or video oriented, though you can include them.
Best for: Podcasters who want to build an interactive community. Threads can be a great place for engaging and interacting with your listeners.
What to post: Text-based promotion, images and audio-grams. You can also post short-form videos but Twitter is not as focussed on this kind of content.
FAQs on How to Promote a Podcast on Social Media
Can I promote a podcast on Instagram?
Absolutely. And you definitely should be promoting your podcast on Instagram. Use a combination of images and short-form videos to create momentum around your upcoming podcast releases. And make sure to utilize stories for maximum engagement and reach amongst your followers.
How do you get your podcast noticed on social media?
It takes time, consistency, and an understanding of each specific platform. You need to have a tailored marketing strategy for each social media platform and make sure to do your research about what kind of content works best for each one.
How often should you promote your podcast on social media?
One thing is certain about social media marketing: staying consistent and relevant is vital. For this reason, you need to be promoting your podcast virtually all the time to keep up the momentum and continue growing your audience.
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