Podcast Promotion: 7 Smart Ways To Improve Your Social Sharing

Podcasting is super hot but many skilled podcasters aren’t using social media to it’s full advantage to build their podcast tribe. Although the main focus is the podcast, it really helps to have a website, social media, and visual brand to grow your podcast to it’s full potential. Here are seven smart ways that you can improve your podcast promotion that are totally doable.

Podcast promotion is similar in many ways to promoting blog content but here are a few tips specifically for podcasters based on less than optimal planning that I’ve seen:

Craft titles with creativity

Think beyond the name of your podcast when crafting titles for each episode.

Utility has it’s place but you need to entice people to listen to your podcast. Having a uniform title format can be beneficial but don’t forget the creative element of crafting a title for your podcast.

Skip the episode number for social shares

While it holds value in some places to talk about the episode number, on social sharing it uses valuable real estate.

In this example from Erik Fisher’s Beyond the To Do List podcast website, Erik has the episode number at the end of his blog title but when I hit the social sharing button for Twitter, he’s customized the text to include the @mention of his guest and removed the episode number. Perfect!

You only have seventy characters for Google’s snippet which is what shows in Google’s results for blog articles.

Use this tool to test your title and optimize for Google search results.

I use the free Yoast SEO plugin which has this feature baked in.

Write solid show notes

Show notes are the writeup that accompany your podcast. Many successful podcasters partner the launch of the podcast episode with a full blog post which is very smart. Michael Stelzner’s most recent podcast for Social Media Examiner was called Instagram Algorithm: How Marketers Should Alter Their Strategy. This is a full stand-alone blog article which also provides links to everything discussed in the podcast interview as well as a bio for the guest and some of the interview.

The bare minimum for podcast show notes should be: guest bio, links to important items from interview, links to guests social media accounts and blog, a great shareable graphic, and a call to action to subscribe to your podcast.

Embedding your podcast is a must! Podcast Master Pat Flynn created a fantastic plug in for you: The Easiest to Use, Best Looking Podcast Plugin Ever Made

As your podcast becomes more successful, creating show notes would be a great task for a virtual assistant to handle. You can create a format for your show notes that could be used for each one. This way your assistant can fill in the information and you could finish it off by adding your own intro and closing.

Create shareable tweets

Click to tweet graphics make it easy for people to share. If your fans look like rockstars when they share your content, they’ll get more conversation and interaction which will lead to more sharing from your website. It’s a win/win for you and them.

Create shareable moments on your blog for more social shares. Click To Tweet

I use the Social Warfare plugin which has this feature built in as well as adding graphics for optimized social sharing across Pinterest, Facebook, and more. Try clicking the above graphic to see how it works.

Design a memorable visual brand

The elements of a visual brand for your podcast design are:

• logo – hire a pro to design something that represents your message
• color palette – two or three colors
• font – should fit the tone of your brand
• style of brand – fun, serious, funky

If you’re not sure how to create a visual brand, this is a good place to hire someone. It’s possible to find someone within your budget, no matter how small or large.

If you have a tight budget, find someone that can develop your brand kit in Canva and provide you with a brand board with all the elements so you can create your own designs and remain consistent with your visual brand.

Canva for Work is fantastic for maintaining your brand elements (color codes, fonts, etc.) as well as templates for your designs.

Punctuate with quote graphics

Surely you pulled a few smart nuggets of wisdom in your interview, right? What were the ah-ha moments during the conversation with your guest? Create a shareable quote graphic for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. Sounds like a lot of work but it’s not.

I’ve been using Adobe Spark and love it. I love it so much they noticed and I’m currently a brand ambassador for them! Authentically sharing your passions can lead to great things. But back to your graphics…

Find a few thoughts from your guest interview and create a tweetable quote of about 120 characters. You’ll want to leave room for a hashtag and mentioning your guest – soon you’ll have more spaces since a Twitter rumor is out there stating that @mentions and links won’t count as part of your 140 characters. Then pop a short phrase into Adobe Spark:

The best part is that you can create one graphic and then resize for any social platform in a click. This allows you to create one graphic template and reuse it for each interview quote. I create graphics on my desktop and it syncs to my iPhone and iPad so I can post directly into Instagram and Facebook Mentions which are mobile-only for posting.

See the graphics I made on Pinterest, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter.

Inspire your guests to share

Once your podcast is ready to go live, you can contact your guest with a short, authentic email to say thank you for being a guest on your show and include links to the podcast.

Don’t cut and paste something impersonal with too much crap. No one has time to read it.

It’s also awesome to tag them on social media when you post your podcast but don’t be in-your-face about it.

I hope this gives you some new ideas to implement for your podcast promotion. Let me know which ones you try and how they work for you.

I’d love to know what some of your favorite podcasts are and why.

If you’d like to start a podcast but aren’t sure how, here are some resources for you:

10 Pro Tips For Starting Your First Podcast as a Beginner

Ready to start your own podcast? The podcast workflow

How to Manage a Podcast: Tools and a Checklist for Marketers

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