Listener Engagement: Effective Ways To Foster Audience Participation And Comments

Want your podcast and videocast to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in this noisy digital world, you are not alone. Join the nonprofit community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works. Today, get ready to feed. Feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Feed. You'd brand. I'm Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy, and today we are going to talk about fosting. Should I do that again?

What are you going to talk about?

We're going to talk about fostering listener engagement and comments and we're going to take a little deeper, dive into this. We've talked about this subject a couple times in the past, but we're getting more specific because we think you need to get more specific in order to have success with this. Isn't that right, Tracy?

If we're going to encourage engagement from our listeners. Right. Okay. Encouraging engagement in social media is its own thing. And we're not really, while some of the things tie to social media, we're not really talking about encouraging engagement within your Facebook group and within your social media channel. We're talking about getting your listeners off of your show, off of just listening to, communicating with you. You. Right. We want to encourage that cross engagement. So that's what we're talking about today. So we're getting specific about how to do that. So these are all things that you will say on air and then things that you will then encourage off air. Right. Things that you want them to do. And so that's where we're focusing. But we're also focusing and niching down here because we want you to get really specific and we don't want you to over complicate things. And that's part of the problem, is that we hear all these things we should do. We should get, subscribe, rate and review. We should have a contest, we should have affiliates, we should have sponsors. We should have this and all of those things add layers of audio complication that we cannot handle if we want to encourage that type of level of connection and engagement, which in the end pays more dividends. Right, Tom?

It does. And I want to twist this a little bit. What you were saying, Tracy, is to instead say this is something we could do, but then ask, should we?

Should we? There's some of those things we just shouldn't do because it complicates so Much of the way that our show functions, and there's really little return on investment for the effort of that. The complication actually makes it harder for you to hit that good level of subscriber engagement or listener engagement that we want that actually is going to get you more value in the long run. So we want to kind of simplify things, especially in the beginning, about what we're doing and how we're approaching that encouragement that you're giving on air to get the engagement back.

Now, a lot of you may have heard that sales cliche, a confused mind never buys. And that really applies to podcast listeners, too. If you confuse them, they're not going to take action on what it is you may suggest.

So we were talking about what listeners do, and if listeners aren't engaging with you, it might be because you're confusing them too much. So how do we simplify things, Tom?

How do we simplify things? We give our listeners only one thing to need to remember or one place to go or one thing to do we don't want to include. Hey, don't forget to subscribe, rate and review here. And you're going to go to the guest website there and get this download here, get the link to their book here. Right.

And remember this complicated coupon code. Right. You know, we just can't have that. Right.

You gotta keep calls to action, clear and simple.

Right. So I like to do it with two possible places, depending on what I'm asking my audience to do. Number one, I'd like to get them to my website. Right. Obviously, we always are sending people right back to the website and we really want to do that at all times. But the issue is sometimes we have to ask something that is more of that social engagement. So we want to encourage them to go to one place. Hopefully it's named the same thing. So it's pretty easy for me because I'm at the Binge Factor everywhere, and my show is called the binge factor, the bingefactor.com.

Well, on the website, yeah.

So it's really easy for me to say, go find me on LinkedIn, go find me on Instagram, because I'm in the same places with the same address. Okay. So that's where we solidified things and making it one thing, making it really simple. So even if you don't really want to use a Facebook page or a LinkedIn page, you can use it to link people through to where you want to send them. So that's also, you know, a kind of tip that you can use so if you've got a complicated last name that is hard to spell, you might want to just send them to Your, to your LinkedIn page, your Facebook page, your page, your Instagram account named under your podcast, and then if so, you can cross link them into the other places. So that's a possibility. So keep that in mind. We want to keep sending them to one place, so if we're sending them to our social, we need to send them with a purpose. So I might want to send you to Clubhouse. I might want you to go to Clubhouse and friend me, find me. I'm giving you one thing to do. Go follow me on Clubhouse. Why? Because I'm going to invite you in a room. I'm going to invite you up to speak because you came to me from my podcast. I'm going to help you with that. Whitney does stuff like that when Lauritson, who's her episode aired a couple of weeks ago. And so this is one of the things that she takes people and she'll kind of guide them through something new platform that they've never experienced before, like Clubhouse. She did that with us. And so by being their guide there, you're really inviting them for a deeper engagement on that level. So I'm not just friending you over there, I'm friending you with an upside for me. So that's always a really good path. So if I'm going to invite them to try something new, I'm going to do that. I'm also not going to do that in five different ways, right? I'm not going to say, oh, go friend me on Clubhouse, go join me on LinkedIn, go try my Facebook Live. I'm not going to do all that at once. In fact, I'm probably going to concentrate on Clubhouse for one month. I might do four episodes or eight episodes or whatever that is. I want to do it for enough time that I get people used to it. And this is a problem, Tom, that we see with a lot of people launching they're trying so hard to do. Subscribe, rate, interview, share my show. Like, there's just too many calls to action in the beginning. And I'm a bigger fan of that. Eight weeks of subscription and listening is more powerful because when you just launch your show, you want to get onto the top lists everywhere. So I want to focus really on just getting as many subscribers as I can. So I want people to share my show. The rating and reviewing, to be honest with you, doesn't do enough for me then. And I've seen people with hundreds and hundreds of ratings and reviews and people with 10 who still make the top list. So it doesn't seem to be a big enough factor for me to waste my Call to Action using it in those first eight weeks. So I say two months. Do a Call to Action. Just share the show with everyone you can. That's all you're asking your audience to do, share the show.

Because people that become aware of your show, if they like it, they're gonna subscribe. It's really become so well known that you can subscribe to podcasts and not have to go search for it every time. It'll just come right to your phone when it's available every day. To really ask for the subscription, it's.

To the rating and reviewing.

Well, the rating and reviewing, or to even ask for the subscription. I mean, people are going to do it. Just ask people. Share the show. Share with a friend. Let them know about it. Who do you know that might be interested in the show? Please let them know about it. It's just about raising awareness. All over your website is going to be a button. Hey, subscribe. Click here. Here's all the different places that the show is available. You can find it on your favorite app.

And again, keep it simple. Don't tell people to go to Apple. Don't tell them to go to Spotify. Don't tell them to go to iheartra. They're going to go to the place that's their favorite app anyway. So if you're not saying their app, then you're just annoying them. Because I got harassed on Clubhouse recently because I'm an Android user and I discounted Apple podcasts as a player because I've never used it. And I've been a podcast listener for over a decade, and I just don't. Because I'm not going to download it to my Android phone. It doesn't work as well. And so it's just no point in doing that. It's one of those things where then you get in a heated discussion about it and that happened.

Isn't it amazing how. I mean, you'd think that whether you have an Android phone or an iPhone is like some political statement and people get really bothered by that. It's like, I don't think it's any more political than team sports. I like the Red Sox, you like the Houston Astros. Okay, we can do that, right?

And occasionally we might have to have a bet about that.

But for me, it's a design statement. It has nothing to do with anything else. Anyway, but the point of it is, is that we don't need to get into those complicated places because they're smart enough. They're already listening to a podcast. They're smart enough to know that there are podcast players and they have a favorite where they're keeping their playlist, where they're already subscribing. So you're being redundant. It's kind of like today the younger generation laughs when you go out and you say www.potatoes.com. like they roll their eyes when you say that.

Yeah. The www, it really shows that maybe you're kind of old school or Internet 1.0. Right. So unnecessary. You don't need to type www in everywhere. And in fact, most of the time when we repeat that, we flub it anyway.

Yeah. We say it badly. Right?

Yeah.

So there's no reason to do it. And I keep cutting it out of people's outros and they keep getting frustrated with me. But I'm like, you don't need to say it. It sounds terrible when you say it. And to top it all off, you're alienating a younger generation. So let's not do that. So these are the kinds of things where we want to simplify and so be thinking you're saying things. So the thing that I really want to do, though, so I'm inviting people to share for eight weeks. Let's mix it up over that eight weeks. And inviting specific kinds of people. So now I want to niche down and on a certain show, I can say, you know, if this show resonated with you because of this, share it with someone else who has this problem too. Right. So I'm asking them for specific people in their mind. So they're not just saying, oh, I could share this with anyone. They're saying, I'm going to share this with other people of marketing issues. I'm going to share this with other people who have LinkedIn problems. I'm going to share this with other people who are looking at getting on Clubhouse. Right. Whatever that might be. You're giving them a specific type of person for them to hit on. So the minute that person says, oh, yeah, I've been thinking about getting on Clubhouse, what are they going to say to them?

Tom, do you have an iPhone?

Yeah. Besides that. They're going to say, oh, I just heard this great podcaster, you're going to want to check that out. They're giving Clubhouse advice or something like that. Right. So this is the kind of thing that when we're specific about it, it triggers a Bell in their head when that person match comes up our minds. This is our daughter's favorite thing to do. Right. Our youngest daughter loves the matching game. And she gets really, really pissed if you win. Right. She wants to win. Our minds seek out matches. It is how our brains work. It is something that we love. When patterns match together, there's synergy that goes on. There's bells literally that go off in our brain. Good job. And so we want that we seek that. So if we give them something to match against, they're more likely to engage and do it. Now your listeners are ticking up. And the reason I say mix it up and try different types of people. And so many people are so broad. I just want anyone to listen.

No, no. It's like when you make everything a priority, nothing is a priority. If you want to try to share it with everybody or tell them just you share it with everyone or whoever you think might be interested. I like your idea, Tracy, of getting very specific.

Yeah. One thing. Really specific.

Yeah. Who do you know that has this need or who do you know that fits this profile and that gets people thinking more specifically about who they can share with?

Right. These are kinds of things. Tom, you had an example earlier and I really love this. So after we've tried some of these things, like getting people to share, trying a subscribe rate interview, any other kind of, I'm going to say, programmatic things that we want to try to shift to do, and we don't have a major call to action in terms of like we want them to go to a webinar or a new course or a new book or whatever that is. Then we might want to test out and try some other ways to get our listeners to communicate with us, especially in the early days, because sometimes it takes 25 or more episodes before we start hearing back from the audience. So how soon can we get them to come back? We need to be specific. And you were giving a great example earlier of npr, which you listen to. And would you tell them what NPR does to try to encourage a listener questions?

Yeah, absolutely. And this is a great tip for any podcaster, not just new ones, all you seasoned podcasters as well. It takes a little advanced planning. So I just want to preface this with that you do have to have a little bit of a plan with what your episodes are going to be coming up, because what you can do in your episode and NPR does this on some of their shows, their radio shows during the day that are very topic based. Like, hey, today we're doing an episode about non fundable tokens. Right. I heard that recently. And then they'll have another one about an issue about parents that have kids that are in distance learning at home this year or whatever. Right. They'll say, hey, they'll be talking on a topic and then come back. They're going to take a break, right? And they say, hey, before we take a break, we want to mention something that we'd like a little help with from our listeners for our next show.

So they're teasing ahead, teasing ahead as.

To what an upcoming show subject is going to be about, which is making.

You want to stick and listen and make sure you tune in tomorrow or the next week.

And it may not be your very next show. It may be a show we're going to do next month or a show we're going to an upcoming show in a couple of weeks. Because remember, with podcasting, we're not doing live radio. We need to plan a little further ahead. We need to leave time for people to actually do what we're about to ask.

We don't have an NPR team. Right.

Well, but we need to leave time for people to actually reach out to you for what you're about to ask them to participate in and then use that in a show. You're recording that, then it's going to come out a couple weeks later. So it might be for a show we're going to do next month, right? And then say, hey, so we are going to do a show on. Pick a topic.

Space trash.

Oh, I love that. Space junk. Yeah, we're going to do a show on space junk. Although I don't know how many people would have personal experience with that. But we'll invite you to ask a question. What is it you'd like to know about Space junk? Maybe you want to know how much there is. Maybe you want to know if anybody's doing something about it. Whatever it is, does it bother you? Are you interested? Please let us know. And now here comes the call to action. Are you going to invite them to reach out to you? And there are a number of ways to do this, and I think we've shared some of those in the past.

Right? And remember again, the best place to do this is one place on social or your website. And we prefer your website because at the end of the day, that's where everything is. So even if you're going to link through to your, to the other things, if you can do it on your website, do it there as your first course of action. Your first Choice. So in the case of npr, they are inviting you to go to their website, right?

There are things you can do now, there are things, tools you can put on your website where people can leave you a voicemail. I definitely encourage that because if they'll have to check a box that says they're willing to have this recording published so you can use it in your podcast. If you're going to answer a question from a listener, it's so wonderful to actually take an audio clip of them asking the question and we can cut that into your podcast audio. And even if you're doing video, we can cut it in and just have a still image up while that's happening. And you can let that question be asked by the listener and then you address it and answer it. So.

Right. And imagine later when you're posting that episode out on social media, you can tag that person who contributed. They're going to share it with all their friends. So it's going to create that ripple of other fans, right? So it does have a great way. But again, one of the best places to do this as your website and there's a whole bunch, bunch of different tools. Google Voice has a great one. Super simple, inexpensive, I mean, mostly free, but you can put a link to your Google Voice that they can just call and leave a voicemail message that way. And it's right. And so if you're using a mobile phone, you just click on the phone number and it's going to go straight to the Google Voice line and record for you. There's really not much else to do. And you got them to hit your website, so you got them to go there and check things out. So don't have to recite these phone numbers and do these things on air. You can just make it simple as there's a phone number right at the top of the page. Click on that and it'll leave a voicemail for us. You know, that's such a simple, straightforward way to get actual engagement and super easy because I'm already on my phone listening. It's super easy for me to just click that and then tell you my message rather than sit down and type it out for you. So we want to match our audience preferred format, which in this case is audio, with the output or the call to action direction that we're asking them to do. So, you know, we find too many people. It's like send me an email. But so many people are not email people and they're just not going to sit down and remember to do that, yeah.

And then you have to give them an email address. They have to remember that we are advocates of just giving people one thing to remember. That's why so often we say your website, and hopefully your website is not a really long URL. And if it is, we would suggest, you know what, get a shorter URL, that's a referring URL, you know, it'll forward into the website. We're not saying you have to change your website, but let's come up with something that's pretty easy to remember. Gohere.com.

Right, right. So you know, another thing is like Jimmy Fallon, hashtag of the week, right. Day before he starts the hashtag chain and then he gives the topic and the hashtag. So this is something that we also want you to do. So like NPR has their topic planned, but if you don't have a topic, why don't you ask for a direction or a question? Or you have this already pre planned as to what you're going to ask them. And that's what you're asking them to comment on, that's what you're asking them to engage on. And you can ask them to do it on the website or over social media. And it's a little easier on social media to get them to start commenting on this thing. And of course you have to have the social post that matches the call to action that you made on the show. So you want to have a social post planned, ask for the exact same call to action that you asked on your show. You want to have them both go live at the same time so that it's right there, easy for them to start commenting on. And then the second part of that that I want is get some plants. Get some, and I don't mean nice pretty green ones, I mean planted people like this. We learned early on. Get some people to start the discussion for you. Get some people in your community, reward them for helping out, reward them for jumping on a question quickly. If you've got the engagement going or if you don't have the engagement going in your social channel to begin with, get a pod, a group of people together who are going to comment on everything you post and you're going to comment on everything they post. And that way you're creating this opportunity that this stuff is getting jumped on immediately and it creates a cascade of other people not wanting to miss out.

So you're saying create a podcast pod.

Create a podcast pod.

Okay, I like it.

Yeah.

Well, you know, and I've always been an advocate from our Earliest days as podcasters. I'm going to peel back the curtain a little bit here, okay. If your audience is not initially asking questions or commenting, it's okay to fake it. Not indefinitely, but just to prime the pumps, just to get things moving in the right direction. You can say, hey, you know, today we're talking on this subject. You're recording your episode, and I want to share a question that one of our listeners wrote in, and he's Liam from New Jersey, and here's his question. Now, Liam from New Jersey is somebody I grew up with from grade school, three, high school, and he doesn't know a damn thing about what I'm doing, but he doesn't mind if I use his name. And I'm not giving you his last name, really, and say he asked a question. So you get your audience conditioned to be like, oh, this person wrote in and asked a question. And look, they read it on the show, you know?

Yeah. And so if you go further and eventually get permission, you can do shout outs. So when you do shout outs to somebody who asked the question, they become an even more raving fan. Right. Like, now they feel recognized and noticed. So this happened really recently with us where I saw that there was someone who was commenting really frequently on our Instagram posts, and I was thanking her pretty regularly for commenting and answering any questions that she was doing. She happened to pop into our clubhouse, and I recognized her immediately because her podcast name was really unusual. And so she's actually one of my recent binge factors. So she got herself invited on the binge factor just for popping into the clubhouse room because she showed up in two places. So that said to me a really dedicated fan, and I rewarded that. And other people start to hear that, see that they're going to want that same recognition as well. So, Raffi Wagner, Not a Momma Life. You're going to want to check out her episode because she's got some brilliant things that she says there.

You know, another thing I want to suggest that you can do if you don't want to ask a question, let's say you have an episode you're doing on a controversial topic. Okay. And maybe there's really two sides to this, or maybe there's some complex negotiation. There could be all sorts of potential things you want to talk about on a subject. You can take a poll. You can poll your listeners and you say, hey, we're curious at our podcast how many of you felt this way about the subject, or how many of you felt that way, or how many of you agree with our guest and how many of you don't and say, and so go to our website and complete the poll or go to our Facebook page and do hashtag poll, yes or no, or you know, you can get them to some way let you know whether they feel this way or that way. And then you also tease your audience, say, and so, okay, guys, so we'll give you the results of that poll on an upcoming episode. So that keeps them coming back and listening to just get that piece of information.

Right. And I'm a bigger fan of if you're going to do a poll or some kind of thing like that, you want to ask it everywhere. So you're going to put it on Facebook, you want to put it on Twitter, you want to put it wherever you can do a poll of some kind. And you can also simplify it as Tom went, and just put yes, no or whatever into the comments. And that helps as well. It's just a little hard to add it up if they don't have a real poll feature in your particular social media that you're utilizing, but most of them have it.

That's a good problem to have. If you count too many comments by hand, you're doing, you're doing really well.

Yeah. Make sure that you're doing it everywhere. And you're referencing back that I asked this on my podcast so that there's also the people who just find the poll are also referencing back to the fact that this came from your podcast. We see that not crossing back happening too often. So we want to make sure that we're cross pollinating everything that we do. The last thing before we go, I just want to say is when you're asking for feedback on something, you need to ask a better question. You need to get really specific and detailed with your question asking. Just like we said, you needed to get detailed about the focus of the person you wanted them to share the show with. You want to do the same thing with questions. You want to ask really good questions. And while sometimes you want the yes, no thing, like in a poll situation, for the most part you want to ask a question that requires a little bit more detailed answer. And so we're asking a deeper, more specific question. Sometimes we want to have a little fun, clever twist to it. Right. If we make it a little bit of fun. I was on a podcast once where they would run a question about if you had a magical power, what would it be? I just thought, okay, let me think of all this. Yesterday, Vanessa had messy hair. She was dressed up like Hermione and she had messy hair. She hadn't combed her hair in the morning. And I said, you know, you're kind of looking like Hermione's very first movie, whatever the first one was called. But you're looking at Hermione year one, when she didn't know the spell yet to comb her hair. And I said, you know what you need? You need a spell called Beautify. And she loved it and thought it was hilarious. So I'm going to be the Beautify magic, you know. But if you ask the question in that way, there's going to be all these funny stories like I just told. There's going to be people who's like, if I had magic power, I'd be doing this with my family or I'd make my dog behave, which we need to do. No barking during. No barking during this hour, right? So any of those things, right? These would be the kind of fun responses you could get. And that creates a de. Fun engagement. Now the next rule of thumb is when that happens, acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge, acknowledge. Make sure you're letting them know you read their comment. If you're confused by their comment, ask for clarification. And if you think their comment would be good for someone else, like they shared a resource or something that's good for someone else, pay it forward. Share it with someone. Tag someone in your community that might want to read this comment. Now you're creating relationships and network and community and that engagement encourages more engagement.

There are, say a lot of comments or questions, whatever it is, if you're willing to, maybe you're only going to highlight one that you use a recording of if there is one, and answer it. But you can also acknowledge others as, hey, we got some great questions. We really appreciate hearing from Joe in Seattle and Janet in Texas or whatever. And you give shout outs to people, you don't have to use their last names but. But they'll know you're talking about them, say what city?

And again, being specific about it. So Joe in Seattle shared this. Like, you know, being specific about what it was that they shared that's valuable, that you enjoyed about it or it made me think about that. And so when you're really specific about all of these things, you get detailed and granular about them, that people feel heard, they feel rewarded for the effort that they put in to say something to you. And that effort is recognized by other people as being rewarded. Now they all want to do it.

Too, and they actually feel more a part of Your community is the thing. The more that you do it, the more you make them a part of it. They feel, wow, I really belong. This is my tribe. Right. And I'm going to keep coming back and listening. But also, one point of detail, definitely. If you want to know where people are, you got to make sure you're specific and say, hey, let us know not only your question, but where you are in the country. We'd love to know.

Right? But that's still adding complications. So if not, you can always follow up and ask them later. And that generates more conversation. So I'm a fan of that. If that's the secondary thing or if you're just like, hey, can I confirm? Can I use your profile photo in my blog? You know, so that when I highlight the question you gave, I want to put your profile photo. Is that okay? Start DMing them like you're creating a deeper conversation and a more acknowledged relationship. They're going to love that. And then what you really want at the end of the day, right? Encouraging engagement gets you more listeners. Right? Because when they're engaged, their audience sees that and they want to share it more. And now more listeners are coming. So at the end of the day, this is all about getting more and more listeners into your show.

That's awesome. I love it, Tracy. Something everybody can do, right?

So, anyway, we'll be back. We're doing this more and more. We're taking questions in our Facebook group that is private to brandcasters. So these are our client burning questions. These are the questions from successful podcasters. But if you'd like to participate in this process and you don't belong to the Brandcasters Facebook group because you're not a client yet, then you can still reach out to us on our website, productize.com and send a question in there, or you can find us on social media odditize anywhere and you'll be able to ask us that question there. And when you ask us a question, we want it to be advanced podcasting questions. We don't want the silly like, how do I start a podcast? What size is cover art? We want the specific stuff you're really struggling with over increasing listeners, dealing with guests, interviewing all of those really tough things that you're finding out as you're diving into your podcasting journey.

All right, well, hey, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time. This has been Tom and Tracy on feed.

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