Podcast Social Shares: How To Pick Powerful Social Media Hashtags And Create Stronger Captions

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works.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 finish feed your brand with smart cut tactics proven to cast your original voice to the world.

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Monetize and feed your brand. We are in Social Media Month and we are talking podcasts, social shares in general, but specifically today we're going to talk about how to pick powerful social media hashtags and create stronger captions. This is not a lot of people's strong suit. I mean, I know a lot of writers because I happen to be one. So, you know, that's a difference. My community might be, but most of our podcasters on our network at Poditize are much more comfortable in the media world. They're much more comfortable creating the videos, creating the audios, not comfortable in the writing part. And so this can be a struggle for many people. So that's why I want to really bring this up. Because also, remember, it's so hard to be seen, right? We really have a tough time getting our social posts seen. About 1.3%, especially of our business posts, are all that seen any given day by our community. So that's really hard. I mean, this is low conversion. So they're seeing it and they're converting. So the posting amount is about, I don't know, it's somewhere between 10 and 20%, depending on whether you're posting in your own group or you're posting on your profiles or things like that, whether you're doing videos, you're doing stories. So it varies between that, but the conversion rate stays the same. Someone taking action, making comments, sharing, doing those things. The engagement piece is so low, so we want to up those odds as best we can. And some of those things here are what we're going to talk about today. We are going to remind you, I want to remind you that throughout Social media month, we have talked about your social goals. Starter social media goals might be things like attracting the right people. So we want to make sure that everything we write matches to the right people. We want to, at the end of the day, get more connections, and we want to get engagement from those connections because engagement means more listeners for your podcast. Or it might mean more sales to your business. Oh, I spelled engagement wrong. Ooh, I can't Affix that anyway, build a relationship might be the other thing that you want to do. And that is, you know, you want to create a dialogue going that involves further engagement and ongoing posts and a theme. Ongoing. Right. So you're continually serving them, doing things that might be a series that you're teaching, like what I'm doing here with Social Media Month. So these are things that we want to do. So what are your social goals are really important to keep in mind as we move forward. So we're focusing on our audience interests and pains for your ideal prospect. Right, the ideal listener to your podcast. That might be the thing as well. So we're focusing on what interests them and where their pain points are with everything that we post. So that is the focus of our writing, it's focus of our topics. It's a focus of the choices we made. Remember, we've already talked about assets and choosing assets. You know, if you're a productized customers, you've got them created already within your multimedia package. You've got video, audio, blog and social share graphics to be able to utilize. Sometimes we use the term graphics, sometimes we use assets. We use assets because everything is so multimedia might be a video meme. So I'm just gonna run through them really quick here so you guys can be remind of what they might be. So here are some examples. You might have episode art. So these might be what you're posting on your blog. They're the header, they're the square, they're the featured image, whatever you might call them. That might be something that you want to share. It might be what we call ego bait, which is a comment you make about your guest. So it's like a testimonial. It is a statement that you made during the show or whatever it is that you want to say. But it's a graphic version of audiograms. We have different kinds here. Remember the ones with the audio waves? Those might be something you want to use because they go into social media like a video. So they can help with that sort of video formulaic thing that happens within social media today. We also have video memes. That's typically just a video clip. Sometimes they have graphics around them, sometimes they don't. Like the one in the middle here. Guest quotes quote of what somebody says on your show. That might be something you want to share or a host quote something you said on your show. So we're going to now write strong captions based on that. And when we do, we want to consider these things. We want to Consider our lead in tips and teaching, urgency and question. We want to encompass all of that into a strong caption. So I want you to understand that there are captions in different places on social media too. There are captions sometimes above. If you look at LinkedIn, that's a really typical comment above Facebook feed, you have the caption above. So the caption is the leading thing. So the thing you say is the first thing they see before they see the image on Instagram, it's reversed your captions below. So just thinking about that, it depends on what platform you're using, where it's going to be. But either way, the image, the graphic, the asset you're using, they need to tie together, they need to impact each other. And the idea is that obviously you're building this in so that you will be able to get people to click through and do some more things. Right? So we want to do this in the most comprehensive possible way, but we also don't want to be really lengthy. We're not writing an article here, right. We want to lead them to wherever it is they're going. So this is much longer slide than I like to do, but I wanted to give you this so that you could have it as a takeaway. So when I talk about lead and I'm talking about like the first sentence, the headline, you can sometimes think of it, sometimes people create a like separated headline where it's like bold face it maybe has an emoji in it. You'll see that when I give you some examples coming up. You're going to treat your first sentence like a headline. You might want to start with how to. I love starting with activating words. It's something I learned in my journalist class. Right. In my journalism classes, we learn change advice, risk needs, smart, successful talk, grow. We want to use these words to get people activated to do something. That's the first word in our sentence that we use. The other thing we can do is just use how to, as I mentioned already, and just use how to do something. Right? How to do this? We want to keep our first sentence to like, our first session of it like the lead at 8 to 12 words maximum on the 8 side is better, but you can go up to 12 strong headline. We want to figure out the compelling part of it. So if we have how to want to, how to import, how to stop, how to identify, like, we still want an active word there. So it's going to be there. It's just going to be after the how to. We don't want to forget to put that when we Bing. We can also begin with a number like X number of ways or Y this number, you know, five tips to do this, right? Those are always the best, whatever the 10 best ways. Those are all things that you can use as well. A number plays in that. Then we're going to move on to sort of like the meat of our caption, right? So we want to move on to things that are tips and teaching. They do much better on social media. You know, people are out there, especially in this business area. This is not advice for creating influence in terms of like it's all about me, what I think, what, what I'm selling. This is about your unique perspective, but it's combined with being helpful so that it sells your business or what you have to offer. Just a little bit different twist on it. This is our business focused view of this. So you want to take your unique perspective. How different? You don't want to give the same advice everybody else gives. You want to give your twist to it, give your unique direction, your unique angle on it. What do you say that not other people say? If you can find that, start with that. It's also not a commentary, it's not a statement. You're not telling the whole story. That's for the podcast, that's for the video, that's for all the other things that are going to follow. But this is teaching through quick tips and experience. Maybe a story, but a really quick story. This happened to me and this is why I did this, right? And then what I learned from that could be a list of bullets, it could be a thought provoking sentence. We want to keep it short. We don't want this to be the whole thing. I mean people, you're already with the headline, you're barely covering before it will click to read more on almost any platform. So you almost always have to click down to see this section of it. So that leading paragraph really has to or that leading couple of sentences has to really bring you in so that they'll want to check what you say next if you can, so that visually you kept the lead. In short, that next sentence shows they want to see what the whole sentence is. So if you write the next ones as well, you might be able to capture their attention even more and get them to do that. Expand it, read more, scroll down, whatever it requires. I don't put links in my teaching area ever. And if you're linking your podcast, the image is linked, so you just delete that. We never put that in there, we're going to put them in other areas.

The next thing we want to talk about is urgency, right? We really want to have an urgency because I'm scrolling through social media, I'm really busy, and if I'm slowly going through your post and you have something for me, what's going to make me stop? Why should I stop for you? So making it timely, making it really relevant to me, getting me urgent so that it requires me to know about this right now. Read this, listen to it, I'm going to get it. Because if somebody, somebody just saves my post, they will never come back to it. Or if they think, oh, I'll come back, I'll go check out that podcast later. But they didn't click through and subscribe to you or do anything like that. The chances are you've already lost them that it will be hard to go back and find the post. It's almost impossible to find the post later. So we want to make sure that you're capturing them right at that moment and making something so urgent and timely want to give them a fear of missing out. Serious FOMO going on here. Then the last thing we want to leave them is a compelling call to action. Asking a question is a really good call to action. The easiest way to get an engagement is to ask for input, for their experience, for their thoughts. As long as you're very specific about what you want. You know, we try posts and you'll see some of the examples where you go, what are your thoughts? And you get terrible. You get terrible answers. But if you're really specific about it is what are your thoughts about hashtags being used for business purposes, like really specific, then you're going to get a lot more detailed response. So the other thing is that of course, at the end of our caption, we're adding our hashtags in and I'm going to talk about those after we finish this caption section. I decided to go with the caption first because the hashtags tend to be at the bottom. Some people lead with them, but most people put them at the bottom of the post because of how they're a searchable item. So here's some examples. This is a good lead in example. I love the phrase that's put here. I didn't write this. This is from a team. But this is what we do here. I train my team just like I'm right now, so that they can write for me when I'm unable to write. So any posts that you see that came out about the binge factor show feed your brand show didn't come from me. I did review them, but it didn't come from me directly. The posts that you see posted by me are totally different. But the posts that we do here to just promote the show, I'm really busy and you are too. And so this is what I train them in to do. So monetizing your podcast is one of the goals of every podcaster, but the question remains how. Now this is on Instagram, so there's a little bit more that shows. And it talks about getting sponsors to her show. It talks about Crystal o', Keeffe. So she's tagged in this, it talks about the clip. Out, it talks about her husband Tom achieving a sustainable business model. And then the tech cuts off and you see the image. It's a great place to be cut off because I was like, well, what's a sustainable business model? I got to know this. What about monetizing? What does that have to do with anything? They're more likely to read the rest of the post and click through it and stop right there and listen to the clip because there's a video clip that goes along with it. This, along with this. They're likely to do that because of how this was written right here in the caption part. There's also some hashtags at the bottom that are helping us be found. This is another one. Now, sometimes I start with a name. I didn't mention that earlier, but sometimes I start with a name. And the reason is because this Neil Patel is way more famous than me, right? So if I'm starting with the name of someone who's more famous than me and really talking about what they're teaching about, that's going to be kind of an interesting thing. Typically when I do this, there's actually an article from Neil Patel that will be below. But most people won't read the article. They' only read my summary. And that's where I've kind of created a nice niche of creating my version of the takeaways, which isn't his bullets. These do not come from his bullets in the article. These are my view of my takeaway of what, how I would apply what I learned from him. So that's where my twist is. And so when somebody does actually read the article, they go, wow, I can see how you got this. What did you mean by that? And invites engagement. So these are the five important must haves on your landing page. See, there's the sense of urgency right there. But Now I'm teaching you. Set a goal for your landing page. Have a clear call to action. These are set up in bullet points or in a list. Sometimes you have to really force this to make it look right. And it's not always the easiest going to take some experience. You want to keep your copy clear and concise. Start with a centered single column design. Last but not least, do not forget to test. So it's a matter of trial and error. So now I've got like my version of this and it's built off of an article that came below. You can see all the hashtags that I've added to it in the call to action. I kept simple here. Any tips to add comment below? I want this to be an engagement focused post so I'm trying to drive them below to comment on it and they will comment even without reading the article. That's something to keep in mind.

I'm going to give you a few tools that you can try. There's an emoji keyboard that I'll put a link to in the post for this episode on the blog post on potatoes.com and I'll also put that in the Facebook group and the Brandcasters group. So you'll be able to have this link to the emoji keyboard that we use which gives you a bunch of different ones. The most common one, like I use microphone a lot. I'm sure you can also do when I'm talking about listeners, I use the headphones icon a lot. So some really good emojis here that you might find that are unusual and not your typical just smiley faces. Right. So those might be useful to you. The CO Schedule headline tool is what I really good headlines but it doesn't make sentences. So I sometimes use it to create my headline and then I turn that headline into a sentence. So I might take the headline for my show, whatever the episode title was and figure out a way to craft that into a sentence. And so it's just flipping that around. I might take how to at the beginning of it use my episode title. It helps me work in because I already use the CO Schedule headline tool to create that and it's got my keywords already packed into it. Because the other thing we want to do is if we've got some compelling keywords, we want to make sure they're right up there at front, you know, right up there at the front of the top of of the lead in so that we're really getting to somebody who's interested in talking about Passive income, real estate, or creating a podcast, monetizing a show. As we talked about, those are things that are compelling keywords. So those are some tools you can try. Remember, we talked about the urgency, so we're going to talk a little bit about the urgency right now. Why does time matter most? Well, FOMO is a big thing. I mean, it really is. When we have a fear of having something taken away from us, of missing out on something where we could have learned it, of something that's going to really impact our business, it gets our attention. Now we have to value that. At the end of the day, am I like in the middle of driving and it's just not possible for me to stop everything and send comments back and do all that? Yeah, that might happen, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't make me think about it doesn't make me stop, it doesn't catch my attention, which is really our goal on social media. We want to get that very short attention span focused onto us. Right. And so anything that we can do that makes things more timely and urgent are going to be valuable. Here's some examples. This is an urgency example. Advertisers are all in on podcasts. Don't be left out. So now this is not focused really on the podcasters, but I have had a lot of podcasters that read this. You can see this is one of my LinkedIn posts. It got 17,786. That is way above almost all my other posts. It got 125 likes and 47 comments. So you can see it worked, right? It captured their attention, it got them to stop, it got them to listen. And this isn't even my own article. This is a Fast Company article about advertisers. Now, what I wrote in the comment post is a little bit different, though. I actually gave a little twist on it. So if someone read the article, they're going to see that I disagreed. And I actually wrote that in there. So one of the things that I always like to do is make sure there's a really good call to action. Now there's. In that one, the call to action is buried. You can't see it because I couldn't fit it on the page. But I'll show you some that do. So if we're going to ask, we're going to not tell what people what to do. We're going to ask them. We're going to make if all statements and if all statements are something like if all this did for you was fill your website with Lots of content and give you more social media than you could possibly post in a week. Would it be worth it? Right? So we're asking a if all worth it question. We're also going to invite in and that's really important for you podcasters that out here because when we're inviting in, we're really inviting to subscribe. We're inviting them into the community. We're inviting them to listen again and again once they get subscribed and once they're in there, we have them, we have their attention span. So that's way more important is to actually invite them in so that we get them out of social media. So, so here's some other ask examples. This is one of my favorites. The compelling visual adds to it. Are you getting your fun day ask handed to you? You want your business to become highly fundable? Grab your copy now, right? Like it's. That's it. The visual and that single sentence copy just really does it. But it's asking a question like, are you willing to make all these mistakes or do you want your business to be highly fundable? See, the two are working hand in hand. The image and the caption. It's a really good example. An invite example. Don't spend another day stressing yourself on your next episode. Guest. Be a part of community where you can spot the right person to interview. And then down at the bottom, what do we do? We become part of the binge factor community. So we told them why this is important. There's an advice in there about this episode and what they say. And then we're inviting them into the community. Super simple. Click the link in the bio for the rest of the interview. And it also, of course in that bio has the link to the community. So you get both at the same time. So you can see what we're doing here. We're really able to create this ask, invite, compelling community with that sense of urgency all combined together. So we're really putting together a really great caption, great lead in, great teaching, and then ask. Building a call to action that has an urgency to it. And the whole thing drove the urgency through from the beginning to the end. So let's nicely tie it all together and make sure people can find you. So we're going to do some hashtags. So what are hashtags? You know, that's simple. Hashtags. Let's talk some hashtag basics, right? They start with a hashtag. They start with a pound sign for us old school people, right? And they're a Couple of words stuck together. It's usually not just one word, but it can be. So it can be just one where it can be a combination of words like what are hashtags? As I put here, right? You want to make sure your accounts are public or your hashtags aren't going to be seen. It's not useful if you're working in a private group, right? Within our group, if we hashtag only, the group members would see it. So just keep that in mind. So if you're using hashtags within a group, don't spend a lot of time agonizing over finding really great hashtags. Just coin the ones that make it easy for your community to search within the group. So we might have a hashtag podcast marketing. It makes it simple. For every post that we put out or every coaching session that we has to do with marketing has that hashtag in it. Then you all you simply have to do is hashtag podcast marketing within the brandcasters Facebook group and all of a sudd. You can find the content really easily. So we can do it that way. But if we're trying to get out there and get be searchable, we want to make sure that everything's public and we're using it really on our public posts. Most don't put too many words together. Like I don't love what are hashtags. That's a little too much for me. Why hashtags might be enough. I do one pretty frequently because hashtag ilovelucy and my dog's name is Lucy, you know, kind of well known. So sometimes I tie them in and it gets people to see. Like we did a podcast on dogs and that's kind of fun in there and it got trapped into a community. Probably does like dogs. I don't know. I'm sure I love Lucy. There was dogs in there somewhere. I mean, she was from Jamestown, New York.

Thinking about tying those things together, you could use a trendy one just because it happened to tie into what you were talking about. Those are great and those are fine to do. But most often we want to be really relevant and specific with our hashtag use. If it's too obscure, it's going to be hard to find. But if it's too general, like entrepreneur millions of posts, it's just too many and you're not going to be found any easier from that. If we social good entrepreneurs would be a better hashtag because we're now combining a couple of things together. Guarantee you smarter but more relevant audience who's actually interested in entrepreneurship and social good together. Now we're combining them. That's going to be a really good way. And then limit the number of hashtags you use. Sometimes we use six. Most often that's on, I would say, LinkedIn. We use more. We tend to use three to five maximum anywhere else. And then you're going to want to rotate them, and that's really important. Don't use the same hashtag every single time. It can actually hurt your searchability. In some platforms where if on Instagram, if I use the same hashtag every single day, it actually wouldn't help. The algorithm wouldn't help me be found any better. They treat it as being spammy about it. So I have a list of. I don't know, we think we have a list of 50 that we rotate through. So we're constantly using a different one. I don't think you need to go that far. If you went and used five hashtags every single day, and so for five days, you could have a list of 25 and you could rotate them and then work from the beginning through. Work from the end through, you know, just make sure the next week is an exact mirror of it. So that's kind of our strategy for it. I don't know if you have to work that hard, but we think it also creates that kind of variety of making sure that we're utilizing these, what we consider to be valuable hashtags out there. We're utilizing them in a way that is also helping drive business and drive focus on the topics we're talking about. So being relevant about that is really, really important. Why should we use hashtags? Because we want to increase engagement with our followers and we want to get more followers who aren't our followers today. And if they're looking for these topics out there, don't we want to show up? Right. We want to be found. It means that you're taking part in a conversation that's happening on a social media platform around the topic, Right. And you want to be visible in that conversation. So if I want to be visible in marketing, but if I use hashtag marketing, there's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are using that hashtag. And instead I say podcast marketing hashtag. Even within the marketing, people are starting to pay attention. When they type it in, they see the podcast marketing and they're thinking, I want to know more about that. Now I'm a part of the conversation. If Pat Flynn's a part of the conversation and John Lee Dumas is a part of the conversation. Tracey Hazard is now a part of that conversation. It's important to use the hashtags. So one of the things I do is troll my competitors, double check what hashtags they're using and finding the valuable ones. Cause sometimes they are doing a crap job. Like it's not, you know, they're just not doing a great job on this. So I don't want to imitate ad practices, but if they're using some that I consider to be good and I want to be relevant in that conversation, I'm going to use them too. It can also lead to the engagement because people who are interested in being a part of the conversation but don't have a lot of content to contribute, they'll use the hashtags to use a commenting strategy to get them seen as a part of the conversation. It's a brand building agency tool, so it can help you in that as well. That's why you see so much of what was happening on my LinkedIn was getting commented on, is because everyone wants to be a part of that conversation about that. So we want to build brand awareness with our branded hashtags. So we do want to use them. Sometimes I'll use hashtag the binge factor hashtag podcast, hashtag poditize. Right. So we use some of those. I rotate them and I use different ones on different days of the week depending on what the topic is. You can also show support for your social issues. We do hashtag givingtuesday podcasts. I don't always do them every Tuesday, but definitely on giving Tuesday in general. This, this one we will pull out again and we will use it to be a part of the movement at that time as well. When we want to use a hashtag, sometimes we don't have a ton of space and the hashtag can be useful. So that's like on Twitter when you're using it on Instagram. The way the captions are, because they're below, are not as useful or on stories and other things. We might want to put the caption, the hashtag right on the image itself. So we can do some things like that. So we're using hashtags to help build like understanding of what it is that we're talking about so that people will stop, listen, look and go. So that's another way that you might use hashtags. How do we find them? Because I mentioned one way was to go to your competitors and go check them out. But sometimes the most popular hashtags are not the best hashtags. Right. You know, there's a hashtag out there called Follow Me hashtag Follow me. It has 575 million posts on Instagram. That's like huge. So they aren't going to solicit a lot of engagement. They're not going to get you a lot of followers. Then you look like everybody else. So it can either look spammy or like you're just following the crowd. So you may not want to do that. So some of the best ways found is obviously to look at the competitors and other social media influencers. Hashtagify Me is one that helps you use Twitter and Instagram hashtags for your brand. I threw a ton of them out, but it has lists of that you can find out how popular hashtag is. So that can really help. If you've got your list of hashtags that you found from trolling all your competitors, you can then match it against using this tool and say, is it worth it? Which of these lists that I have is popular enough to make it it worth it? And so those are some of the best ways I find to just use hashtags and make them really valuable. Finding them and getting them to work for you to help your post be seen and stopped on. Right. That's what we want. So here's my call to action for you because we're done with our content here. We've talked about captions, we've talked about hashtags, and Social Media Month technically ends with this topic. However, we are always working on topics from a marketing podcast marketing in general. And that must include social media because you can't have a conversation about podcast marketing and not have a conversation about social media promotion as well. So what challenged you most about podcast social media promotion? Make sure you tell me in the Facebook group. Make sure you reach out to me on Instagram anywhere where you're connected with me me. Let's talk about what's challenging you the most. And I'm going to create some more content, some mini masterclasses instead of the longer masterclass. And we will have those all in the poditize.com resources area, or our knowledge base as we like to call it. And you'll be able to do that. So remember Social Media Month, we did a kind of generalized like, how do I plan? How do I promote my podcast using social media? What does that content plan look like? Like, we also optimized our social media channels themselves. The like headers, the images that we use, the headlines that we use. So that our we're optimized for highlighting our podcast and highlighting our businesses. And then we talked about all kinds of different things like Instagram, TV and video within social media and how that can work. And Whitney Lawrence came on and was talking to you about that. And then the last thing of course today we talked about about captions and hashtags. There's still more to come. We didn't really talk about graphics. And that's okay because on Potitize we create graphics for you. And these masterclasses are mainly for our clients. But if you're not in the potatoes community, if you're not a part of our hosting platform or you're not using our done for your services, there are a lot of episodes in feed you'd brand that cover graphic topics and we will be covering more as we move forward. So please join us for those and subscribe to feed your brand if you haven't already. You can also subscribe to the binge factor because when someone does something really great on social media or getting engagement, they're sharing their tips over there and that's always a podcaster that's being interviewed every week on the Binge factor. So thanks everyone for joining me for Social Media Month and for talking about all these great topics and I wish you great social media promotion for your podcast and a lot more listeners to come.

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