Stalking Your Prospective Audience Without Being Creepy

Using Social Media to Locate Podcast Listeners

A podcast audience is usually built slowly, mostly by word of mouth. Personal recommendations have always been the most valuable way to spread the news about any new product. While it might look better to buy social media ads, in many podcasters’ experiences, ads on the social media platforms aren’t very effective.

Here’s why:

• The podcaster doesn’t specify the audience they want to reach. 
• The social media platform has primarily a different audience.
• The ads themselves are not compelling or don’t stand out to get attention.
• The investment is too small to make an impact.

So what do you do to build an audience?

1. Build Your Credibility

Social media isn’t a waste of time. It’s simply how you approach it. Your audience is probably on some or several social media platforms. But which one?

Doing research into your ideal listener will identify what platform you want to be on: It’s not only about what’s the most popular right now. TikTok currently has a large impact, but so did Myspace before Facebook plowed it under. Did anyone predict the recent resurgence of Reddit?

Once you find out where your people are, get there yourself. But don’t announce your podcast just yet.

Build your credibility and your name by participating in groups, discussions, comments and messages on the best platform for you. Reddit, for example, has participation restrictions written into the platform and the audience there can be challenging. Drop in and announce your podcast without creating a persona there and the other Redditors will react – often not in the way you want.

Still, Reddit is becoming a big player these days. Even national news magazines such as Newsweek now use Reddit stories as content. There are podcasters who are publishing content on Reddit, but they’ve been on the platform for a while. When you go on Reddit and find podcasters promoting episodes, it’s because they’ve built an audience.

This sounds very chicken-and-egg but, in fact, those podcasters did the work on Reddit to start out with and built their credibility before making announcements about their shows. One technique I’ve seen used by new podcasters/Redditors is to enter a conversation with a question for the original poster, and take time before recommending a particular episode of their own podcast. So, if you’re a new podcaster, you’ll need to build up your library at the same time.

2. It’s About Content and Relationships

This American Life is a highly regarded, well-known podcast that started on radio. At one point, that organization decided to take the risk of putting its content out for people to listen on their own schedule, aka a podcast. Back in the day, getting a repeat or rerun was subject to the whims of the producers. Now it’s in our hands as listeners. This makes a different dynamic – one that favors podcasters. We reach our audience on their terms.

This is why our content makes a play for the audience through more personal and intimate methods. We are asking for the most valuable commodity a listener has: their time. If we’re not respecting that, we’ll never gain their attention.

Great content delivered in an echoey, hard-to-hear format is as useless as perfect sound but useless information. Yet it’s not only about the quality of the sound in the podcast. To provide content in the way our audience wants to hear it, we could reconsider the “throw it on the wall and see what sticks” method of content development.

Finding out what people want challenges us. But social media platforms have a wealth of answers when you’re willing to do the searches to find out.

Suppose your podcast is about the television smash hit Bridgerton. The next season’s release date is on the lips of every fan. Promos are coming out, theories are discussed. If you’re into historical romance, those discussions can provide you with potential content:

• What is it about that first season that people loved and are looking for in the next?
• What other books/series do these fans follow?
• How does the book series differ from the show?
• How did the producers reproduce the look described in the story into the visual world of TV?

When you know what your audience is asking for, you can provide it. Respect and relate to your audience. When you’ve earned the right to promote your podcast, then you’ll see your audience grow because you’ve invested the time on social media to get to know them.

But not in a stalker way. Don’t do that. That’s creepy. Keep it professional. Keep it respectful. Keep it fun.

Need more tips on growing your audience? Check out Blubrry’s free, online Podcast Manual and let us know what has worked best for your show on our social media.

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