Market Your Podcasts Through Social Media
Marketing your podcasts through social media is critical for building followership. Podcasts themselves are a form of social media, and as such, it is a natural and easy fit to use other SM platforms to promote your message.
There are multiple options, some have a broader impact than others. Here are some of my favorite tools for promoting podcasts:
- Microblogs: Sites like Twitter, Plurk and Jaiku are easy to update each time you have a new podcast. You can set up an automated feed that will post a message to the various networks when a new podcast is up. You do need to spend time building your followership on these networks, however. If not, your posts will be treated a spam.
- Social Networks: Sites like MySpace, FaceBook and Bebo are also great for posting updates. The key to using these networks efficiently is to identify who your target audience is, then find the network that most easily attracts that demographic. Again, you will need to build relationships with followers and not just drop links.
- Social Media Aggregators: Sites like FriendFeed and Lifestream.fm, connect all of your social media interactions on the web and stream them in one site. FriendFeed is probably the most utilized and has a strong user network. In order to build followership, you will need to interact with others around their stream content. This can be a bit overwhelming at times…just the sheer volume of information is intimidating.
- Social Bookmarking Sites: StumbleUpon and Digg are the top two social bookmarking sites. Here you can write a blog post for each podcast, giving people a chance to preview the content. Building followership will help your posts build positive votes, which will give it greater visibility.
This list isn’t comprehensive, but is a good place to start. Using social media vehicles to promote your podcast is essential. But, getting overwhelmed is easy, so start with one or two platforms and build relationships. You may choose to add additional sites in the future, or, you may choose to invest all of your effort in one or two. Experiment with which method works best for you, then make sure you are consistent with your strategy. Good luck!
