Social Media Launch Blueprint: Podcasts, Products, And More!

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community at Podcasters United and podcast industry experts Tom Hazard and Tracy Hazard as they debunk all that outdated and bad advice you've been getting from the podcast gurus and find out what actually works today.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.

Hello and welcome to Feed you'd brand podcast. I'm your host Tom Hazard along with my co host Tracy Hazard. So glad she's back from jury duty to benefit you all. And today's topic is social media launch blueprint podcast products and more. This is Tracy's mojo. She does a masterclass on social media every year because things keep changing every year, things keep evolving. And what we used to do on our podcast 2, 3, 5, 6 plus years ago, guess what? It's different today. So Tracy, tell us about what we can expect today. And I know you have a special message out for some people, right?

Yeah, look, this is social media experts out there. You might be cringing at some of the things that I'm going to suggest because it goes against conventional wisdom in social media. And the reason is, is because this is tied to a podcast, tied to a very timely launch of something. And there's one key difference here. It is ineffective. It does not work to build anticipation of a show that is not available yet. We have been doing this over a decade and it does not work. There is something about the immediate gratification that is necessary for podcast listeners. They want to click, they want to follow it, and they will not register for something. They'll just be like, oh, I'll catch it when it comes onto the app later. So they will not respond in the same way that you normally want to build anticipation for the sales of a product or a book or anything else that you do podcasting, just the listener base doesn't respond well to it.

I do have this conversation a lot with new podcasters who are preparing to launch their show among other people, where they're all asking, how far in advance should I start promoting my podcast? How soon ahead should I be doing pre launch social planning? And there are different strategies for that. And I do think that's maybe the only time you might raise awareness on social media is before your show launches, is what a lot of people say. But I'm curious what you think, Tracy. Certainly I agree on every episode publishing on a regular basis. There's no point in promoting it before the episode's live.

Yeah, I'm talking about the show itself for the very first episode, if you want to think about it. And it doesn't matter if you. I'm going to say here, I am not going to address the complication of what happens if you drop an entire season or 25 episodes. And Tom and I did that multiple times. So I do know how complicated this is. And that is a whole different podcast, a whole different discussion. But it is complicated enough to launch a podcast and share it. But what we found is that saying you're going to produce a show is not effective in terms of building the anticipation that you want and yielding any results. So it is a waste of your time to do that. And I would rather see you spend your time and effort getting your show out. But I do want you to do the planning side of things. And so I am going to talk about what that planning side looks like today because there is a lot of planning and things that you can do in preparation of. It's just not actually posting about it until after the show launches. And here's the complication. Tom, you and I both know that we don't consider Apple's new and noteworthy worthwhile, but there are a lot of people out there that do. They love the vanity of being on the new and noteworthy list. That only happens for the first eight weeks. So the issue is there's one single way that does work, but you have to be willing to forgo the new and noteworthy value because you are unlikely to get it and achieve a top of the list in new and noteworthy via this method. And that is to pre launch a teaser or first episode and syndicate your show eight weeks before. Four to eight weeks before you actually launch it. That's the only way you can build anticipation for a show and not be regularly publishing episodes.

I agree you can do that, Tracy. But here's the reality. I'm sure you're going to make this A point of emphasis here is that podcast listeners do want to be able to dive in right away when they find something. They want to take a deep dive into your content. They want to listen to what you have to say. If you have a trailer that's been out there for four to six weeks and that's all it is. I don't know. You're going to get a lot of people subscribing to that.

And that's why I recommend a first episode. At minimum a first episode. But the reality is that they need a placeholder to subscribe to Follow. And if you don't have an episode, you can't syndicate your show. You cannot put it out and publish it on the apps. So you have to pre publish. The minute you publish on Apple, that time clock starts ticking for your new and noteworthy eight weeks. And if you only have one episode and the next published show has eight, they get eight times the traffic you do and you're down and down and down in the list. This is why it doesn't work. So I'm not a fan of this, but I also really could care less about new and noteworthy. Like so that's, I mean that's a whole nother podcast that we've done before.

We've actually done that episode. There are some companies that will sell you on a launch strategy and the goal is to get you on the notwith, which by the way, nobody can ever guarantee that you'll get there because they don't control Apple and Apple has its own algorithm and how they determine it. You can try to game the system and have a chance of getting there, but even when you do, there's very limited value in it.

Right. We've never seen that translate into a sustainable listener base. Never. I've never had one that I have many, many shows that do fabulous without ever making the new and noteworthy list in a real way. Like everyone makes the list, but you're not in the top 10. And I've seen people in the beginning who can't sustain a thing.

Do you remember what it was like, Tracy, in the very beginning with our first podcast, we were obsessed with new and noteworthy because it was different back then. On Apple, they actually had a list of every new show that had launched in the last eight weeks. And it was three thousands of shows. And you had a way you could count. There was no number that told you what number you are. You literally had to count how many shows are in each row and then how many columns and add them up and get the number. And we were looking at that daily and weekly calculating where are we in the list? Are we rising? Are we falling?

Yeah. And this is it. It's just like books. It's a vanity metric. All those charts are. But we are not going to address that here because what we want to do is get you real listeners from social media. Right? We want to get people to know about your show and, and subscribe to it. And if there's no show to subscribe to, they will not remember and come back later. Like it just isn't something that they could do. There's no way to placehold it. There's no way to do it. They are not the kind of people who are going to go enroll in your email list. It's highly unlikely they're going to do that.

And they're sure not going to put a reminder on their calendar, okay, come back in four weeks when the show launches so I can then subscribe, Right?

And then they're also burned a lot by you podcasters out there who pod fade on them, who say, you're going to launch a show, but never launch a show. You've been saying it for a year and you still haven't gotten it. You're in permanent potential, as we like to call it here, right? You're stuck and you never launch. So they are not going to take their time. They are not going to take you seriously. Real podcast listeners, those that are going to become your fans and your subscribers, are not going to take you seriously. Your friends and family want to know and you should post about it, but just do not expect a concerted response until you're actually syndicated and launched and that you have a place for them to go follow and subscribe to you. That's it. That's my, like, big speech about the why we set this process the way that we did. The next thing that we recommend, which is against traditional social media expertise and wisdom, is that you concentrate on one social channel. And I don't mean you don't post on any other social channels. I'm saying you concentrate on one social channel and gear all of your posts, all of your graphics, all of the things that you do for that channel. And we are not including YouTube here. YouTube is a syndication model for us. Only YouTube shorts count as a social channel for what I'm talking about here today. So. So we don't consider you publishing on YouTube being social media, that you're publishing on YouTube as an episode, like so. It just doesn't count that way. The shorts do, though, because the shorts are promotionary. But we choose one channel because we can only concentrate in the best place where we have the most likelihood for getting listeners. And you know that because likely, if you're listening to our podcast here, you're doing it because you're a business podcaster. You have a business, you have a brand, you have a mission, you have something that you're trying to accomplish, and you want a community, you want to grow that. You want listeners, you want them to find you. So because of that, you do know your best spot might be LinkedIn. Your best place might be Instagram, you know, where you're more likely to generate conversation and build that awareness up. That's what we want to gear. All of our styling and our posting and everything that we're doing for. For one channel. Because it's way too much work to try to handle five channels at a time. And so we concentrate on that. And then if you are already in all those other social media places, you already are there. You already have a Twitter, you already have a rnx, you already have a Pinterest, you already have all of those other things. Go ahead and repost there. But what I'm talking about is a strategy for the first channel, the first place you're going to post. So I have a 42x. I call it the 42x plan, right? I have a where you can do 42 posts in a month. And what I'm going to suggest that you do is look at it as 42 posts about your show in a month. Try to maximize the number of posts, the style of those different posts, maximize that out in that first month or two. And so we'll share that plan. It'll be in the blog post for this episode. It's just a downloadable, like, little, like, chart. And it gives examples of things that you. Types of posts that you could make days that you could post it. And it shows you how to rotate those posts across all the different social channels. And so it's just my rotation model. And so essentially, if I post a graphic quote on Monday on Instagram, on Tuesday maybe it goes to TikTok, and on Wednesday it goes to X, and Thursday it goes to Facebook, and Friday it goes to LinkedIn. Like, whatever it is that you. You're just rotating that.

So, tracy, of your 42 post plan per month, how many different actual posts might there be in there? Because you said you're repurposing them. You do them on the one channel first and then move them to others. So how many unique posts overall might there be?

Probably seven per week is what I'm suggesting in the beginning. And two of those should just be about your show. The fact that you have a new show because it's new. So in this particular case, it's like I use Evergreen in the chart there and substitute for Evergreen. Your new show, show your cover art off, right? Like, do things like that. So announce your show continually for eight weeks, right? For two months worth. And so it's really five posts about the episode, about your episode, about the.

New episode that may be published that week, right?

Exactly. Well, and I'M gonna say when we launch a show, we typically drop a few episodes, right, Tom? Like, that's pretty classic. We recommend like three. We just drop a couple of episodes just so that there's something, a variety to listen to.

Absolutely. When people are looking at a brand new show, as they're been searching on the topics they want to listen to, if they see only one and it published last week, they don't necessarily know when you're going to show up for them again, when there might be a new one. So if you publish three and you backdate them, which you can do, so it looks like you published one a week and only one is this week's. Right, you set up that expectation of that cadence and you're giving people several episodes to listen to, to experience you and say, oh, all right, yeah, I like where this is going. I want to subscribe.

Which, if you're still insisting on a new and noteworthy strategy, is part of the strategy, because you have to get more listens and the more episodes you have, the more listens you have. Right. So that is benefiting you from that perspective. So I'm telling you this because that's a lot to plan and I want you to be thinking about this. This is why you have to give yourself enough time to do the planning. If you have less than 30 days before your launch, you've got a lot of work to do because you really have to think all this through. So one of the first things I want you to do is now that you picked your channel like you said, okay, I'm going to do LinkedIn. I want you to go optimize that channel. I want you to go make sure that you've, like, updated things. It's not still like, listing an old job. You want to fix everything in your profile, rewrite your about section, redo your subtitle or whatever, your job description, your title, whatever it's called on the various platforms. You want to redo that to make sure that it says podcast host and it says the name of your show in there. You want to add a little graphic ingredient somewhere in your profile image where you're adding the. Not your profile like your little, like, picture of you, but like any of the banners or headers that are in your social profile. You want to make sure you're adding the show to that because you should have your cover art by then. You should have your show image by then, the icon for it. Make sure you're putting it up there. So optimize that channel. And then if you've got the other channels. Go ahead and do that or use that as an example and go give it to an assistant and say, hey, can you make sure. And proliferate the other channels to make sure it has this same piece of information. I always do the primary channel myself. From the writing standpoint, it's not something I sub out because I wanted to present that new brand in the midst of my brand in the right way. So you're adding branding, you're updating your profile. So it's a good time to do that. The next thing I want you to do is research two things. Research hashtags that relate to your show. And so to podcast. But it might be like best real estate podcasts, new real estate podcasts, like, whatever it might be. Check out what the hashtag that's currently related to your niche and industry, area that or area that your podcast is about, and the term podcast. Where would somebody hashtag if they were. What would somebody hashtag if they were looking for a new podcast? That's what you're trying to figure that out. You want to make a list of those. You don't need a ton of them. Three to five are fine. And then you want to create a hashtag, a simple hashtag for your show, which I use. Hashtag binge factor or the binge factor.

Right.

It's just easy. Hashtag, binge factor. Hashtag feed your brand.

I was going to say, isn't. Aren't we in feed your brand right now?

We are, but I just wanted to use an example. That's not us all the time. I mean, it is us, but still. So anyway, but you want to just create one because you always want to, like, kind of redo that. So as friends and family and other people are talking about it, you have a hashtag to get them to share so that you can find those posts that people are making quickly by using your own hashtag to search for them. So it's an ask that you're going to make is that they use the hashtag. So if you've ever been to a wedding and they do the hashtag for the wedding, it's an easy way for them to compile the photos and posts that are made about their wedding. Right. So we want to do the same thing here for our launch. So just do it and you can use it again in the future. Right. Like it's. You've already set it up for your show and you're getting your listeners. You can always mention it to your listeners in the future. Hey, if you love the show, post about the show, use hashtag, binge factor or feature brand, right? So those are some things that those are just the two little simple things. They don't take very long. There's lots of hashtag research services that you can use. There's also just do a search and see what happens. It's if you were pretending you were a listener going out there looking for a show, try some searches and it'll serve you up some options. So go ahead and do those things and plan ahead. Then we get to that content calendar side of things where we talk about doing this. 42 the most important part to remember here in the beginning is slightly different from what you'll do later, which is you want to choose your episodes wisely and choose perhaps a different order than you published it.

Now that's an interesting shift from what I would do. I would probably do it in the order I published them. Why might you not want to do that?

Tracy because typically I find that most people will put the episodes that are most important to them first, which is usually like, oh, all about me and my story and all about my system and my process. And they're not the best ones to outreach into the community to get new listeners. So we want the episodes that have the best guests, that have the most right fit audience outreach or the ones that are most active in the chosen platform. So I want, if I'm choosing LinkedIn, I want the ones that are most active on LinkedIn. I want to choose those guests out of my list. So you may want to think about that before you hit syndication and publish right. Of your first episodes. You might want to think about that order before you syndicate your show, because putting them and then they are in the order that you want them in. So it's okay to have an introduction episode, it's okay to have those things in there, but it's not necessary to be sending those out immediately because they're more like sales messages than they are getting followers than they're going to do to get you followers. So we really want to do that. We want to plan the episodes that are going to connect and interact with that. We can plan for connection and interaction the most. So let me say that properly. But you want to plan that connection that you're going to make, because if that guest is going to do a better job of sharing your show, then your show is going to be exposed to more listeners. The third thing we want to look for in those guests is if there are any of them. So I said before best audience reach. So. So in your niche obviously, and the ones that have the most podcast listeners. So if they're already podcast hosts, they're ideal to front load in your podcast or to share on your show and then anyone that you've already had interactions with. So in other words, if they have a group or a community or any of those other things you want to interact with them. So those are the three types of of guests we want to front load into our launch strategy for social media.

That makes sense. Tracy. I agree with that. And while one footnote, while we don't always know how big our guests podcast listenership really is, because I mean, they may give you an estimate of how many downloads a month they get or how many subscribers they think they have, you never really know. But if you pick a guest who has a podcast that has 150 episodes already or 200 episodes already, chances are they've got a much bigger podcast listening audience certainly than you do. Starting from scratch. Right?

Right. Just think about it this way. If you have a podcast, you have podcast listeners. Because you have a social media profile doesn't mean you have podcast listeners. So just because somebody has a high social media influence level doesn't mean they're podcast listeners in their community. So that's what we're trying for is we want podcast listeners, we want people who are going to hit subscribe, so that's what we're going for. The next thing that you have to prep up in addition to like planning all the content now that you know which episodes you're going to do is go and friend them ahead of time. Make sure you are connected with them on social media because that is a huge mistake and miss later and you're going to struggle for it. And they're going to be like, oh, I'm sorry, I was on vacation, I missed it. Give them a heads up, connect with them, interact with them, comment in there, let people know who you are in their community already. Do it in a generous way. Don't be doing it like, hey, my podcast is coming out. Don't push out for that. But you can just say, hey, I had so much fun interviewing you, I cannot wait for it to launch. And it's launching in a couple of weeks. You can say it in that way.

So brilliant. Tracy, I think I agree with you. So many people, probably the typical podcaster who is overwhelmed maybe doing too much of it themselves probably isn't thinking how important it is. Hey, I've got this person scheduled in two weeks or three Weeks or a month to be on my podcast, I need to go connect with them on social media. Right now it probably is overlooked.

Absolutely. So now that you know what episodes are, you're connected to all of those people, you want to create a buzz with them and your friends and family and your staff. If you've got staff, use your staff. And so you want to do this and sort of create a pod for your pod. So if anyone's heard the term an Instagram pod. Right. And this is where you go. And there's LinkedIn pods where you go in and everyone comments on everyone else's stuff.

Stuff.

Right. So we want to create a pod for our pod. So we're going to create our own here. And it's really for a limited time because you're doing collaborations and other things as you go on. When you're promoting your episodes, you're doing that with your guests. That's why you have guests for those of you that do or in within your community, while you have community. Right. But we want to do this with all of those guests. We want to do it with friends and family that we know are strong in the social channel we chose. Right. So we want to pick the ones that are strong in LinkedIn. If we chose LinkedIn and we want. So I'm never going to choose Tom because he's never going to comment and share. He's never going to go on his LinkedIn. He's just, he barely like looks at his direct messages. Not going to do it. But if I want to get somebody to comment on Facebook, I'm totally going to. Tom, you're laughing over there because you know I nailed you.

Yeah, obviously, you know, and this is true. I feel guilty about that because I have an automated system connecting with LinkedIn and doing things business wise. And we have team that are posting on my LinkedIn for me as me, because I can't do everything everywhere. Right. But I realized LinkedIn from a business perspective is probably one that I really should be primarily engaged in and not so much on Facebook. But.

Right. And honestly, for the purposes here, it doesn't matter if the guest has a team who's doing it for you or that they're doing it themselves. With the exception of if you want that personal connection and commenting going on. Like, if I really want Tom to answer me, I know I've got to go to Facebook to get him to answer me. Right?

Yeah. If your guest, if you were interviewing your guest, as some people do, that's their ideal customer or client and they're trying to build rapport with them. That's where I think this would make a lot more sense. You've got to meet them where they want to be engaged.

Right. And that's why you're choosing wisely to begin with. Right. But now that we've got this, like, we've picked our posts, we've created all the 42 posts that we're going to use. Right. We've created graphics for them, quote graphics and video shorts, and we've created all the different kinds of things and we plan that all out. We want to put it in a big swipe file. And a swipe file is something that you can share out. You can put it in a Google Drive, you can put it in a Dropbox folder, like whatever you want. You can do that and share it out with everyone in your pod. For your pod. Right. In your pod, you want to share it out with all the guests and all your friends and family and all your team and have them all be able to pick, choose, select things that they might want to share over the course of the month. And here's what a lot of people don't do. They only share the stuff for the guest episode. So if I had Tom on my show, I only share Tom's stuff with Tom. If you're going to do a launch, put them in a big pile in the folder. So put all the quote graphics together, all the like, so that they're all labeled. Right, Right. But because you don't know, Tom might be a huge fan of one of the other guests you have, and he's really excited about sharing that quote from that guest for your show. So by pulling them all together for everything you're going to launch in that month, you're helping them see where they can play the best with you. You and collaborate the best with you. Because remember, if the show gets a lift, the episode I was interviewed on gets a lift.

Very interesting, Tracy. I never would have thought of that. To pull all your social assets for the month worth of episodes. So every guest sees all of them. Yeah. You think they might really pick up and share some of the other stuff. Or I guess you could invite them to, if you're willing to suggest it.

Yeah. And that's what you do when you prepare a swipe file. There's also going to be a doc in there that has, like, comments and things that you suggested. Copy and paste things. Right. You want to make this as easy as possible for them. So suggested posts and various things like that. So you have all of that going on and you want to give that to them for the show in general. But it would be so great if they would customize something. It's just like, I'm so excited. This show just launched and like, here's all the information about the show and, and then you put the quote, graphic of it. And my favorite guest that's coming up is so and so. So you're going to want to subscribe. So you're prepping it because you don't know when that episode is airing, when you do it in a pool. So keep in mind that you should in your titles for the graphics. You should always give a date on when it should air so that they do know in case they want to share it. Timely.

A couple of things come to mind about that is that you're right. There's maybe I'm not the most high profile guest in that month, but there are some others in our niche in our industry that are much more well known. If I share that, I'm associated with them and then that rubs off on me and might then encourage people to listen to my episode too. But wouldn't it be interesting, Tracy? I mean, we don't do this right now, I don't think. But what if you made a compilation graphic this month, Here are my guests, and you put all four of them on the same graphic.

So we actually do do that. We do it in like what you missed. That's how we do it. We do what you missed because then it's easier afterwards. But you can create an Instagram story like that. And so lots of good influencers, people who are really good in their social channel, want to create something that not everybody else is using. And by giving them everything at once, you're giving them more options and less work that they have to do on their own to create that. So that's one of the ways. Don't forget in that document we're sharing, like swipe copy and things that they could use, don't forget to give them those hashtags that you researched. Please, please use these hashtags. Be very clear about it. Definitely write that in the letter when you share the file, the folder link with them and everything. And so in that group sharing thing, don't forget that you also did a little research. You should do a little research on groups or pages, if it depends on the social platform, whether or not that works for you. Right? But if there are groups and pages, you want to make sure you have permission ahead of time. So now's the Time to ask for that. Say, here's are some of the things that I'm going to post. Is it all right if I post these in the group? Do you want to post them in the group instead? As the group leader? Like, you could ask them to do that as well. So that's the time to make sure that you have permission. And what I do is, is basically if they don't respond, then I'm going to treat it as permission. So like, and then I'm like, I sent it to you, like, let them apologize later, right? If they were unhappy with it. But I sent it to you, I thought it was okay. You didn't respond and tell me not to. So that's one of the things that I always do is I make sure to get those people into my pod and then list them into it. So the other thing that I want you to realize that you could also start dropping in and these are some last minute ads. So you've got this all preplanned and then you syndicate and then you launch and then you kind of come out with everything right. And as you come out with them, you're, you're sharing this post. Leave a little buffer room for some last minute things, things that are really great to post afterwards. And those might be reviews, testimonials. So if somebody rated and reviewed you, you could just make a screenshot of it and share it. If somebody shared and made a post about it, right, you want to repost their repost, right? So you want to share the comments and other things that are happening throughout the places and like give yourself some shout outs for the fact that this is a good show. And whenever you do that, put it up in the post, put it in the graphic and put it in the comments about where it came from.

Tracy, I'm a big fan of testimonials and I think podcasters don't ask for them enough. Like from a guest. What was your experience like? Would you be willing to give a one minute video testimonial? And if you the best time to ask for that, you finished your interview and they're still on Zoom with you or Riverside or whatever you're using, just do it right there. See if they'd be willing to do it. They almost never refuse you. And if they do and say, oh, I'll do it later, they're probably never going to do it. But if they had a good experience, they'll probably willing to do it right then and you can capture it. I've been doing this in some other ways. And you'd be just surprised how many people are willing to, especially when they're just coming off of the experience, having enjoyed it so much. They're happy. They're sort of in the honeymoon phase, if you will, of doing this interview with you for your podcast. They're probably going to do it right.

And then the other thing is, is that if you have people who maybe turned you down on your or didn't respond back as a guest, that's a great way to share that with them and say, hey, look, they had a great experience. Do you want to come on now, like. And so you can also tap into sharing and commenting with people that you want to be your future guests because they have the right audience. So you're kind of publicly inviting them. That can work really well, especially with one of those testimonial posts. But so always be thinking about how you're, like, doing this. So the one thing that I want you to also remember afterwards is that just posting it is not good enough. Right. You're asking everyone to comment like and share. That means you have to do it, too. That means you should tag someone. You should go into your own comments. You make sure you reply to your comments. Make sure you're actively leaving time during that launch month for you to interact with your own comments and posts. You need to do that. And the other thing is, if you have a team, sometimes they post wrong or sometimes the tagging the at so and so doesn't work. You may need to go in and edit your post. So try to do it in a very timely manner when you know the posts are going out. So keep an eye on your own schedule. This is kind of something where it's like, it would be a shame if you realized I interviewed Tom and he wasn't really tagged properly. And it's a week later. We missed a lot of that social momentum because I didn't tag them right away. So be checking yours. It happens all the time. That's using some of the posting apps. The tagging part fails.

So you mean the automated systems to auto post on social media?

Yeah, and you need to use them because you've got 42 posts you're planning. It's confusing.

You can't do it all.

Yeah, you can't do it all. But you do know when they're gonna post and everything. So go in. Like, I make it a practice to go into my socials every morning for 30 minutes and I just will go through them on a launch day and just make sure everything looks Right. And check all the comments and everything. And then on a launch day, I'll check back every few hours. I don't do it like every minute. I don't personally turn on my notifications, but this might be a time period where you want to turn on your notifications so you get notified about every post so you can comment back more urgently and immediately. So I have a lot going on, so that's not possible for me. But I also am very good about checking every few hours. So a couple of other tips that I want to give you is that there are some people who really want that new and noteworthy strategy or want a Spotify strategy. Like they want a lot of followers on Spotify. If that's your goal, then the only place you want to send them for this first month is to your Apple link. If you're doing new, noteworthy or your Spotify link, do not mix it up. Because a real podcast listener who's like, I will never listen on Apple. I have an Android device, I will just go to my favorite app and find your show. I don't need your link anyway. But by putting that in there, you're planting that. You want them to subscribe on Apple. So if somebody's not a podcast listener and they are not a regular one and they do it, you want them to click through to the platform you want them to use. That's only if you have one of those strategies. If you have a business and your podcast is serving that business, you better only send them to the podcast page on your website. Do not send them to your hosting company's page. Do not waste your hard earned traffic. If someone clicks a link and goes outside of their social media app, you need it to be valuable to you. Put it on your website, Tom. And I cannot say this one enough. You go for it. It's your fat meetings.

No, I feel like a broken record. I say it all the time and actually had someone who's a customer and we're supporting for hosting and their podcast is being promoted to new listeners and they're sending all the traffic to a page that is not their own website, even though they have one. And I'm like, really? I don't understand the logic in that or what you think you're going to get that's going to help you. I mean, you send it to a page on your website, long as they can listen to your podcast right there, and I have to click a bunch of more clicks to get somewhere to be able to play it, they're going to play it and if they play it on your website, if you do it right, it counts as a play in your analytics. So you want them on your website. Spend more time learning about you. What else do you have to offer? I mean most of you are building.

A podcast, you're building a podcast to lead generate. So why would you send them to.

Apple or even to build community, whatever it is. I mean, you really need to make sure you're going to benefit most from that traffic rather than give that traffic benefit to another website. Even if that other website or other platform has your show there, they're getting more benefit from the traffic that you don't need to give them.

So the other thing I want to mention is do not use social media as a YouTube strategy. Social media, they're not great at sending people out to YouTube to go do it. You're not going to get traffic from from your social channel to YouTube. Use YouTube system itself and increase your number of shorts per episode during your launch period. Do five a day, however many, I mean Opus clip that we use all the time. Opus Pro, I think actually, sorry, Opus is like one of those AI tools. It'll make 20 clips for you from an episode. So use them, use them and rotate them. Do five a day for five days and make sure you're sending back to the full length episode. So use YouTube within itself. Treat it like its own separate thing. It is a publishing channel. It is not a social media channel. Okay, Our goal isn't comments, although we would love that. And there's ways to do that. And it's a whole nother episode with Fran Asaro to get to do that. However, that is not its purpose when you're trying to launch a show and really get it going. But do not bother. It is a waste of time to try to get people to leave Instagram and go to YouTube. People to subscribe to your show. That is the one thing you can do, right? Do that one thing from Instagram, do that one thing from LinkedIn. Because the algorithms over on those platforms are geared to not let people leave to go to YouTube. They don't want them to leave their channel. So it's not really going to work well. But if you've also got a ton of shorts, use them in your social channel.

Yeah, use them in your social channel. But on YouTube that you said it, Tracy. But it really is worth one point of emphasis here. Link those shorts to the long video. Because YouTube Shorts is a social media kind of experience. People are just going through short after short. But at the end of that short, you can actually serve up your long full YouTube video for them to go see the whole episode. That's going to serve you very, very well.

Yeah. So make sure to do that. So those are the kinds of things, the last two things is like, look, don't forget to email, don't forget to do publicity, don't forget to do some things outside of your social and mention your social. Right. As you're doing that for your newly launched show. Do whatever you can. There one other thing is like, look, if you really want to have a Apple strategy and a Spotify strategy, use the show itself to do that. Add adds in. We have an ad mixing platform on potatoes. It's one of the reasons people use them. We usually don't recommend people use the ad mixing until they have 25 episodes or more because it's not as worthwhile. However, you can use the ads at the ad mixing for a launch period to drop in a little ad that says, hey, I'm a brand new show, I really need your help sharing the show or liking it. Rating and review on Apple. Right. Whatever it is that you really want, use the ads for someone who's actually listening, who can do that. I do not recommend on social media wasting your time on a rate and review strategy in your launch period because it's too distracting to do that. But you could certainly do that on your show if you wanted because now they've listened to it, now you're asking them for a rating and review. That's pretty easy to do. At that point they're already in the app.

And then with the ad mixing system, after your launch phase, you can pull those ads out without having to re edit anything very easily. Just so they're not there forever. So just exactly about that.

Yeah, yeah. And you can always also put a little we've had it happen where it's like, hey, thank you so much for giving the benefit of a doubt to a brand new show. I really appreciate it. And if you enjoyed this show, share it with a friend. You can do that. Do that during your launch period and take that out. Because when you're 100 episodes or more, you certainly didn't want to have a.

Brand new show at that point. Right?

Yeah. So anyway, so think about doing some of those things and using some of these extra tools. They are more complicated, they are more complex in the planning process. Which is again why the number one thing that you need to do instead of worrying about building anticipation is do the planning. Plan this all out. Give yourself a good 30 to 60 days to plan it out.

So, Tracy, what about for all the podcast listeners who have already launched their show months or a year ago? Who knows what? A lot of these strategies can apply to raising awareness of an existing show too, right?

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this is something that you can do after the fact. You can do it with like your best episodes. You can do it with things that you've missed. You can do it with like, hey, I'm doing a real big show reminder here because I am the best hidden gem in the niche. Right. So there's all kinds of things that you can do in. If you wanted to make a big social media push, treat this advice for a launch as the same thing as a push program. And if you're new on a social platform, do it the same way. So if you're brand new to Instagram and you're just out there, this is a great way to treat it. Just like you did when you launched your show, do the same thing on Instagram at that moment in time. Because you're now you're seasoning a channel and the more posts you make in the beginning of a channel, the more, the better off you are as well. So this is another strategy why we say start with one, then move to the next and move to the next and move to the next.

Let's call it a social channel debut. Really? Right. It's now exclusive there. It's kind of like what all the different TV streaming things do. Exclusive on Netflix or Premiere.

How many times have we gotten fooled thinking Outlander is new to Netflix and it's not new.

We watched or no, we were. They said new series. We're like, oh, there's a new Outlander series. No, it's only new to Netflix. It wasn't new. In fact, new there. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But still for the social channels are a little different where people do have a preference of one and so you're reaching them where they want to be reached. So it's not a bad idea.

That's right. Absolutely. So I know that was a lot. And social media is complex and a lot. But remember that we have a lot of tips, a lot of master classes, a lot of things to serve you. And so search for and look for in our tip library on podcasters united.org anything that you're looking for and it'll serve you up a bunch of options. And very soon I'm going to have a really secret thing that's going to come out in about a month. I can't wait to tell you. That's going to be AI driven. That is going to superpower our tip library.

It's going to be done in a month.

It's going to be done in a couple of weeks. I think whether we put it on the tip library or not, might take a month.

All right, well, I'm excited for that. Yeah.

So stay tuned. Make sure you follow us here. Make sure you join us back for those lives. And if you were in our community, you're always getting notifications and you're always getting in and you could be asking us really specific social media platform questions coming up next for the next 15 minutes in our community. So make sure to join us.

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