George B. Thomas shares strategies for building a podcast community. He covers leveraging audience interaction, choosing interview guests strategically, and using social media to grow listeners.
How do you build that community? That might be a question, right? You're worried if we put forth this effort, how do we actually build a community? How do we get listeners? Are they really going to want to pay attention to us? Here's some ways with what I've said this morning, what you should understand and embrace. It's not as difficult as we think because it's at your core and it's in your outline. And what I mean by that, as far as the core, if you do engage with your why if. If you do pay attention to your audience, if those are your main factors moving forward, that's your core. Now in your outline is what I really want to talk about. Because you want to be smart about what you're going to create. Before I go into our outline, what I want you to realize, if you decide to do a podcast that is an interview based podcast, then being smart is being smart on the guests that you would actually come on and interview. Because those are the keywords that you're going to be able to target. Those are when you actually do the podcast for the articles that you're gonna create. Cause it all comes back to content. But consistent sections you can see here, three out of the six are based on community. And what do I mean by that? HubSpot wishlist means anybody in the world that uses HubSpot can email us and say, man, I wish the tool would do this. What we can do is collect the mass amount of listeners, point them to a place to vote it up and then HubSpot goes, oh my gosh, why is all of a sudden there are 200 votes for this ideas.HubSpot.com thing? Well, I'll tell you why, because the hubcast mentioned it and that's what we do for our community. Another one you'll see is Tweets of the Week. I will tell you right here and now that I will grow a community of listeners. 1, 2, 5, 85 tweets at a time. What do I mean by that? HubSpot has hashtags that they rock out on Twitter. InboundLearning, HubSpotting Inbound16 the there's a ton of them. And what I randomly do is go and pick people out of those hashtags, throw them in our show because they had awesome or creative tweets. Or maybe they just look handsome like this guy right here. And then we put them in the show and so they know that they have been put in the show. We mention them, they listen. All of a sudden they become lifelong listeners of the show. They tell their friends about it, and hey, we've got a billion people listening. Actually, not a billion, but about 5,000amonth. When you figure that HubSpot only has 18,000 users, a group of 5,000 is a pretty substantial amount of that community. I'm happy with it.
