What's the best social media platform for your podcast?

Voice Over: 00:00:00

Got dreams of being a professional podcaster, but have no idea what you're doing. This is impossible. That's about to change. A new kind of school. Welcome to the PodSchool Podcast.

Rachel Corbett: 00:00:10

Hello. Welcome to the show.

Today I'm going to answer a question from Emily, who asked, what is the best social media platform for podcasting? Hmm. I wish there was an easy answer for this, and I wish it was just one platform.

And I wish when you did stuff on it, it just magically made everybody come over. Doesn't quite work like that, unfortunately. Emily. God damn it. The really annoying answer to the question is that it depends where your audience is.

And I know when you don't have an audience yet, or even when you do, you're like, where are you guys? Where are you hanging out? What are you doing? And that takes research, and that can be annoying. It's exhausting. That's the real life answer.

You know, I get it, I get it. You just want to. You just want the answer. I know.

And sometimes you're just like, I don't want to find out where these pay more because it takes time, it takes experimentation, it takes tracking, it takes all of that kind of stuff. So you really need to be where the people who want to consume your content are. In some instances, that will be easier to discern than others.

For example, LinkedIn, much sort of forgotten social media platform. Not forgotten in the way that there aren't many people on there. There are, but not many people think of it as a place to kind of share content.

It's like, why would I have a LinkedIn platform? I'm not looking for a job. It's like, no, no, it can be much more than that.

And if you content is helpful for people who own businesses or, you know, anything in that space, there's this mountain of people. It doesn't need to be even people that are own businesses. It's like employees, it's everybody.

If you can think, you know what, there are people on here that I'm trying to appeal to that if I get my content right, I could actually bring them across to my podcast. That could be a great platform for you, outside of the ones that people usually think of. TikTok, Instagram, those kind of things.

I've seen a lot of audience come across from TikTok followers to podcasters. One of the things to note is that you can't like, put a clickable link in your bio unless you have a certain number of TikTok followers.

And I think people generally in that platform like to Stay in that platform. So some of this sharing and promotion around your podcast is really around awareness, and it's often not a click back to your podcast itself.

So that can feel really frustrating. But it's all part of the promotional kind of plan. Some of the content that you do will get people to click.

A lot of it will just be about getting your show, your name, your content out there. And that's very hard to measure because you're like, what impact is this having?

Sure, you can look in your social media analytics, some things you can attach a link to.

Like if you're sharing a story on Instagram, you could attach a link that was trackable to that, and you actually can track whether people downloaded now with certain links. But a lot of the other stuff you're like, I could see if people saw it, but are they ever gonna come to my podcast? I don't know.

So some of this stuff is really annoying. One of the things I would say, definitely use trackable links where you're going to link platforms like Potter.

If you are using for Spotify, Spotify for creators, they purchased Chartable, which was the platform that most of us used to use that was really good for tracking whether people were consuming your content. You will have those tools within Spotify for creators. Potter is a replacement. Not as robust as Chartable was.

And there are others out there where you can actually put a bit of code on your RSS feed so that when people click the link, you don't.

You're not just registering a link click, but you're registering whether somebody comes through and listens to your podcast after clicking on that link, because that's really what you're trying to do.

So if you're using those kind of links, you can put them in different places and have different links for different places and say, oh, okay, well, I actually have a lot of people clicking on my Instagram link, but nobody clicks on my Facebook link. Now, does that mean that nobody's aware of your podcast on Facebook? No.

Might just mean that they go and find you in your podcast app and listen to another to you another way. So you can't really tell. So this is where it all becomes exhausting.

But one of the main things I would say that you definitely want to do is do less rather than more. You want to do one, two platforms really well as opposed to everything.

And you can start kind of sharing out your content because you can repurpose across platforms. Right. A TikTok video would work great on it as an Instagram reel. You can share. That's a great YouTube short.

So you can have the same piece of content that goes across different platforms. You will ideally be adjusting the copy of the caption for each of those platforms and making sure that it's optimized for those.

And you can use AI tools like ChatGPT to help you at least come up with a draft of the those kind of things. But even if you sort of started to share on a few and then you realized, ah, that's not kind of working, I'll turn that off.

Ideally, you want to get to a point where you've got one or two that are working really well for you, and you can just double down on that. Because the other thing that you have to factor into all of this is engagement, and that is responding to people who are responding to you.

And that is really, really hard if you're across all platforms. I speak from experience here. I find it very, very hard to keep on top of the engagement across my plat.

And I know that is an essential part of growth on these platforms. And so that is something to consider too, if you've got one or two platforms that you're focused on.

Much easier to jump into your DMs and your messages and make sure that you're responding to people getting back to their comments, those kind of things. Those things are much easier when you have less platforms to focus on. So there's no one best platform.

And in fact, I've seen almost all of them work well for different shows.

You know, I hear a lot of people talk about the fact that nobody goes on Facebook anymore, but I have seen a lot of shows that have most of their audience coming from Facebook. Or people might say Twitter is a bin fire now, but some people might really work well on Twitter.

I think one space that's new that a lot of people are talking about is the Notes feed in Substack, which is technically not a social media platform in and of itself. It's kind of more of a feed within Substack as a platform. But a lot of people are talking about how that feels like Twitter did originally.

And so a lot of people are going there. But Substack is a platform that a lot of people are gravitating towards anyway. So it's. It's really overwhelming. I get it.

You know, I understand it is really hard to work out where to go when there are so many platforms, but I think you have to pick which ones feel right for you. Also, which ones do you have audience on?

You know, if you've already got a bit of an Instagram following or you've already got some audience over here. Start there. You know, starting there is way easier than starting something up from scratch and sort of building it.

And if you get success on those platforms or those platforms, work them, think, okay, well, could I add in another platform? You don't have to be everywhere to be able to get your show out there.

And in fact, it can feel very exhausting when you are everywhere and it's not really sustainable. So try and use those trackable links and some of the data within the social media platforms to work out. Is this stuff engaging?

Are people engaging with it? Are they watching it? Do they care? Are they clicking through?

When I go into the back end of a platform like Potter, which of the platforms are getting most people listening to my content? Do I want to just focus on that? Is my social media, is the point of my social media content for me and my show about getting people to listen?

And if it is, let me focus on that one or two platforms that that is where that is happening. Because it's. You just got drown out some of the noise. There's a lot of noise. There's a lot of different paths we can go down.

And it is utterly impossible, especially if you're an independent creator juggling this on top of everything else, to go down every single path. But it is tempting to do so. It is tempting to do so. I wish somebody could come in and just go, don't do that. That, that, that, that. Don't do it.

Don't do any. I wish somebody could come in and say, don't do any of it. Any of it. The only way, shut all your accounts down. Shut them all down.

You don't have to do any more social media ever again in your entire life. And that would be a sweet, sweet dream. But it's not the world we live in yet.

But can it be one day, please, hopefully, when my daughter is of that age? Because I really don't want to deal with her having to live through social media. Honestly, what if we do this to ourselves anyway?

You didn't come here to hear about my existential crisis, nor my concerns about parenting my child through the age of social media.

You came here to work out what the best social media platform for your podcast is, and I haven't given you an answer, so what a waste of everybody's time. I do hope, however, despite the fact that that's not quite an answer, I have given you enough to work with to kind of ascertain that you.

You do not need to be everywhere. I think if there's one takeaway, please take that away. You do not need to be everywhere.

And even if you are kind of in most places for a short term, with the purpose of.

Okay, over the next three months, two months, whatever it is, I'm going to share things to these platforms and work out where people are responding, and then I'm going to pare back on the ones that aren't working. That could really help you as well. So thank you so much for the question. I get it. It's a tough one.

It really does drive me nuts, personally, because there's a lot of these areas where if you like creating the content, you like making this stuff, there's a lot of stuff around it that's necessary, but it's just annoying. There really is annoying. I feel you. I feel you.

If you've got a question, please head to the description of the episode and you can submit it there, as well as find out all the ways that you work with me. And thanks so much for listening. I'll see you next week.

Voice Over: 00:09:55

That's all for today.