Why Should You Begin Your Podcast Social Media Promotion On Only One Platform?

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Hey everyone, welcome to feed your brand. I'm Tom Hazel, my co host Tracy, and today we're going to talk about starting out on social media with your podcast. And boy, I'll tell you, social media for podcasters, we can go down a very deep rabbit hole there. This is going to be a narrow topic for just starting out, right Tracy?

No, actually it's not for just starting out. No, it's for just starting out promoting your podcast on social media. I want to be clear on this, it's not for just starting on social media as a podcast.

Oh, no, no, I meant, I meant promoting your show. Maybe I didn't.

It doesn't matter if you've been doing social media for quite some time or you're an expert at Instagram or TikTok or wherever you're you are. This is about if you're just starting your podcast and you've never used podcasting in social media as part of your content or promotion strategy with social media. So this is our recommendation for this and we why we recommend one channel is what we're really talking about today. There's two whole gigantic workshops we just did in the last month that are going to be added to the podcast episode here. So you'll be able to link through to watch those videos. They're like an hour to 90 minute webinars that we did workshops that we did with our clients that I'm happy to share with all of you. Feed your brand listeners. You're going to get the bonus of being able to access that because it's not readily available, but we're going to have that in the blog post for this episode@potatize.com under the feed your brand tab. Or you can go feed your brand co and you'll be able to get directly there to find the podcast episode and then you can go there and get straight to those two workshops we did one on. That's a social media starter, assuming that you've really, really not done social media before. And the second one is an advanced social media which is just more advanced concepts as to what we're going to talk here. But one of the controversial things that we've had a lot of debate about is why we only choose and recommend one. Social media we've come up against got a lot of clients who have social media advisors or coaches and who are urging them to just do it all, do it everywhere. And we say, I don't recommend that. And I have pushed back I don't know how many times on clients who push back on us on this. And we really only recommend doing one social media channel to start with. When you are promoting your podcast episodes, you can of course say, I've got a podcast everywhere on social media. It's no different than you promoting your course, your book, things that you normally would promote in the course of everything. Let everybody know you have a podcast, there's no question about that. Do that everywhere. Everywhere. But when you're starting out and you don't know what's going to resonate with your audience yet, we recommend doing only one social media app as the focus of it doesn't mean you can't reshare on other social media. But we want you to start with one focus only for how you're going to format your content, how you're going to test it out, and what you're going to do with this. So the example of this is I'm going to start with LinkedIn, because that's an easy one and it's where a lot of you business podcasters will start with. I guarantee you it's just going to be where you're going to start. So if I'm promoting a podcast episode and I've decided that LinkedIn is my one thing that I'm going to focus on first, my primary that I'm going to focus on first, then I'm going to make a decision. How many days of the week am I going to post there? I personally post five days a week, actually, sometimes seven. But five days a week is my commitment. And then if I have extra things to promote during the week, I'll promote seven. And that might be because we did a workshop or because we did something extra special that week. I'll go to seven days just so that I don't mess up my normal posting schedule. So I've got five days a week that I'm going to post. I personally post twice a day. Not everybody does. You can choose to do one. So I'm just going to use in the example here, one time a day. So if I've got five days a week and I've got a podcast episode that I want to promote once a day, every day. Over the course of those five days, I want to use a different format of content and test it out on each day of the week. So on Monday, I might post what we call internally here, ego bait, which is the graphic quote image. It's like a testimonial about why our guest was so great on our show or what's so amazing about them that we had our guests. So essentially it's an announcement that says this wonderful guest is on the show, and here's why. So it's a graphic image with a post that goes along with it, with a tag to tag the guest so that they know that I'm promoting their episode. And I might do that both in the post and in the comment. So now I've tested out what I would call we call the ego bait, the quote graphic about the guest. Day two, I want to post a video clip. I'll do a video meme, we call it here. It'll be under a minute, about a minute. It might be under two minutes on LinkedIn. Yeah, yeah, under two minutes. For absolute certainty, if it, if my focus were TikTok or Instagram, I would make it under one minute completely. Like it would be my focus, but because it's LinkedIn, I can go a little bit longer. So I might go under two minutes. And so it's about a 21 to 2 minute video meme clip. There is zero branding. I don't brand it with my podcast episode. I don't do anything about it until maybe the end clip. So, like, it might, it might finish the clip and then end with an image of my cover art that says listen to the whole episode here and it'll have the binge factor or feed your brand or whatever that is. So I don't do any branding though, on it. There's captioning on it. And that captioning is built in by my team and by us by Potitize. And we don't do that auto captioning from LinkedIn because I don't want them to get it wrong. They don't know the terminology. And if you use the auto captioning on any of the social media channels, nine times out of 10, they're going to get your industry language wrong, which is something you don't want to have happen on your video clips. So day one was the guest sort of graphic. The day two is the video meme. Day three might be a more of what you would call like a story if you were doing Instagram where It's a, quote, graphic of something I said on the show, a quote, graphic of something the guest said of the show and the COVID art for the episode. So a graphic of what the episode title was. And it runs in a. Runs like a video, because video does so well. So we create it into a video, but it's really just a rotation of three graphics and with maybe a little voiceover, but probably not. It's probably just the three graphics themselves. And then the post that I create for that, that links to the episode blog, not to the podcast on Apple or Spotify, links to the episode blog. So that's day three. Day four. I'll go back to something where I've clipped video clip of the guest for. And I want to hear what the guest had to say, the advice that the guest gave. So this is another guest promotion on day four. And so it is a video meme, just like we were talking about before. But that video meme and the whole post has the tag for the guest. It's really focused on what they said that was so tremendously important. And we will actually quote out what was said in the clip. And it's usually. This one's usually under a minute. And, you know, it could even be 30 seconds. And we'll quote out the quote of what they said in the post itself. So even though the video is there with what it says, we've actually physically quoted it in the post itself. So that's day four. And on day five of it, and. And we don't do Monday through Friday, we kind of offset it and it's usually like Sunday through Thursday. That's kind of our model of it just because of how we do it. But that's our choices because we know how our LinkedIn runs. But if you're. So that's why I'm saying day one, day two, day three to day five here, day five is a. What did you miss? And typically, we might actually run a video carousel kind of idea of multiple graphics of different episodes that they missed the course of the last four weeks or this episode, this new episode grouped with two other episodes that are related to it that might be interesting about the topic. So it's kind of a what you missed out on because you're not listening to the binge factor or what you missed out on because you're not getting your tactics and tips from feed your brand. That's how we do it. That's kind of our weekly focus. So here's the thing. We dialed this in. We know that this works. We used to have audiograms in the place where I'm featuring the video meme from the guest. Those audiograms just don't work. And so in order to test out and make sure it wasn't the fact that maybe Thursdays at 1pm just doesn't work really well, we put something that we knew was working video memes, and we put it into the Thursday slot and tested it out. And what we found was that video meme worked better. It worked five times better than when we were using the audiogram. So. So if you do this across too many social media channels and you're playing, you have no. What we would call pure design of experiment to test out what type of content works with your audience, what type of content works for the channel that you're utilizing, and is it the day of the day and the time. There's too many variables in it. So this is why we come back to recommending one social channel that is your main focus for it and dialing it in there, getting it right, working on it. And we recommend doing this for at least 90 days, so at least three months. But if you're new to social media, so you don't have all the data on the best time of day to post and things like that, so you're not starting with the best information to begin with because it's brand new to you, you may need to wait six months total. And if you're posting daily episodes, this is much more complicated. So this is for someone who really is doing a weekly show. And I just want to be clear on this. If you're doing a daily show, this gets a whole lot more complex in terms of number of posts that you have to make per day, the episode rotation, and what you're doing. So that's. Watch that advanced social media workshop that I told you about, because we did talk about how ways to do that and ways to handle multiple episodes at once and things like that. But this is why we recommend one, because you really need to do an experiment. Even if you're great at LinkedIn and you've been amazing at it, you need to understand how your podcast is being shared with that audience. So it's translating into new listeners, new engagement, engagement from those listeners, like how that is working for you and what you can do about it. And you can't do that if you're spreading yourself too thin, doing it everywhere at once, and you find out one thing's working over here and another thing's working over at this other social channel. It's confusing things for you. So what I recommend again, one social channel. Pick the one that it has the most obvious audience for you. For us, like I said, business to business. LinkedIn's the most obvious for us. That's why I chose it as the example here. But for you, it might be TikTok, it might be Instagram, it might be Twitter. It doesn't matter which it is. Just decide that primary because you know that channel well, because you already know you connect with the audience there. So you've seen what's resonated before when you've used it before or you're really testing out. The idea of this is where I think my audience is. Let's see if they're actually there. And so that's your test as well. So does that make sense, Tom, because you're kind of a novice to social media, you don't do the posting here. I do most of it. Doesn't that make sense to pick one channel?

It does make complete sense and it's precisely because it's overwhelming. And even though, yeah, I mean, I use social media personally, I don't use it that much in business. I think we have someone on our team that logs into LinkedIn and makes posts for me. So even posts that say they're from me, I don't do them. Occasionally they need me to.

Okay, they don't log in. Just to keep that in mind, we use a third party buffer or meet.

Edgar, one of those, they're scheduling those. Or if they need me to do something, they literally give it to me and say, here, copy this and paste this in LinkedIn and post it, please. So I'll do that. But no, that's, it's, it's completely fair to me. What makes the most sense, because I understand complexities and systems and processes and things, is that if you engage in more than one social media channel at a time and you don't yet know what's really going to work and what's not going to work. And if you have too many very variables going on at one time, you know, if you change more than one thing at a time, you're not going to go know which one of those two or three things you changed is what made the difference and worked. Right. So you've got to approach this in a methodical way so that you actually get a proper feedback loop and know whether something's working or not. I mean, I don't, I don't think any of us need just busy time posting things on social media. Just because we don't have enough to do in our lives. Right. We want to spend time and learn what works so that we can get more awareness for our shows. Right. And, and, and that's the tough thing is that it is so different for everybody. And your subject matter too.

Right. There's just so many variables and that's why we want to narrow those variables down. Again, it doesn't mean you can't share that everywhere. It just means that the creation, the what you're deciding and what you're testing and watching starts with that one social channel only. And so if you're only going to post once a week, post once a week there, it doesn't really matter. And then reshare that on Instagram, on TikTok, on, just reshare it in the other places on the other days of the week. This is my other recommendation to you is that if you are going to reshare the same content. So if I'm going to do video memes on Tuesday, I'm not going to do video memes on Tuesday on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. I'm going to and Facebook. I'm going to do video memes on Tuesday on LinkedIn because it's my primary, I'm testing it out. Then I'm going to do that video meme on Wednesday on Instagram, Thursday on TikTok, Friday on Twitter, Saturday on Facebook, whatever it is. I might stand Instagram and Facebook on the same day, I might do that because they auto post to each other. But you see what I'm doing with that is I'm offsetting it so that not in case people are following me everywhere. They don't get the same thing on the same day at the same time. Right.

You're mixing it up and you want to have a plan. And I think that's where using a tool like Buffer Meet Edgar or something like that is very helpful because you can schedule that video meme to go live on LinkedIn on Tuesday and live on and then you just say and another one on Thursday and then you do the same thing with each of them. And so you have, you know, you may have five different pieces of content you're sharing, each going out each day but to a different social platform and you, you mix it up. Right?

That's right. That's right. And then what we do again is we come back at the 90 days or at the six month mark, whatever it is that is right for you, we come back and we take a look at what was resonating what was working. And then we make one major change at a time. We change either the day, the times we change, or we change the type of content because we see something's not working. We remove audiograms, but we leave the date and time intact so that we're not changing too many variables at once, because then we have a false failure or a false success. We don't understand what really works. So we just try to change one variable at a time.

Well, I think that's words to the wise, Tracy. And I think we risk going down a deeper rabbit hole if we continue on this topic. I mean, I think we wanted a narrow topic for today.

Right? And the workshops will do. The workshops will do the heavy lifting for a lot of the other things. The last thing, though, that I do want to leave you with is if your coaches push back on you, if your team pushes back on you and say, no, no, no, we can do this everywhere at once. Remember that you are new to podcasting and that creating a great podcast needs to be your focus or no one will continue to listen. It won't be sustainable, and you will be wasting your time. So if you switch your focus from that podcast to having to do everything on social media, it's too much too soon. Until you're absolutely sure your content is working, your process is working, your audience is working, all of those things are really working with your podcast as a whole. So this is also another reason why we say to only work on one thing at a time. So concentrate on your podcast. Take the five things in this case that Potitize does for you. If you're using our done for you production services or model them. If you're going to do it yourself, that's completely fine. And take those things, figure out how to share them each week on one platform. That's the process flow right there. Then when you get that right, measure it, take a look at it. 90 days or 6 months, set a time for yourself that you're comfortable with, and then look both at how did my podcast do during that time period? Was I really great? Am I getting good feedback on the content, on what I'm producing? And then is this working on social media? And if and what's not working? Let's make that one adjustment at a time. Go every 30 days and make a small adjustment, and every 30 days and make a small, small adjustment.

And also, Tracy, after that, one social platform, you have that figured out, at least to a level.

That's right.

Not that you aren't going to make changes in course. Correct. As time goes on. Once you have that one figured out, then you can layer in Social Platform 2, right?

That's right. And you'll make just different decisions because TikTok's a different platform. Maybe you need shorter clips over there. Maybe you need. So you might decide on Platform two that you're going to take pieces of what worked, but you're going to mess with it a little bit because this platform and audience is a little bit different in what they accept from content. So that's where you'll play with that as well. If you have no information and no data, you're going to take exactly what you did in LinkedIn, you'll move it to TikTok. When we figure out what's not working there after three months, then you'll go, okay, let's make an adjustment. So that's how we do it.

Sounds perfect. All right, well, hope everyone got some really good value out of that. Thank you so much for listening. Many more great topics like this within our episodes of Feed you'd brand, which you will find on potatoise.com thanks for.

Even more resources on the blog for this episode@potatoes.com or feedyourbrand.co.

All right, thanks for listening everybody. This has been Tom and Tracy Hazard on Feed you'd brand.

For more tips, tactics and strategies, visit us online@potatopoties.com or on social odatize. Thanks for exploring the power of podcasting and how to be seen, heard, found and rewarded in our noisy digital world. Keep on podcasting.