How to Promote a Podcast on Social Media: 10 Proven Strategies

Social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube are reaching the widest audience in history as they transform how content are consumed and shared daily. For podcasters like you, these platforms offer exceptional opportunities to increase your reach, engage your audience, and build a loyal community.

However, promoting your podcast on social media is more than just sharing links and asking people to repost for you. It involves strategic planning, creativity, and understanding the details of each platform to maximize impact and grow your audience.

Through this guide, we present to you all the strategies you need to promote your podcast, leverage, and scale optimally on social media. This 10-strategy guide contains all the tested and proven strategies you need to get started. Are you ready?

Let’s get started.

1. Have a Deep Understanding of your Target Audience

We know you’ve heard this over and over again but you’re not escaping it today either. The benefits of researching and discovering your audience can never be overemphasized. And the major reason for this is that it helps your workflow and predicts the next moves of your audience. You need to have a detailed understanding of their pain points and needs to determine the type of content they expect from you.

It is impossible to create content for everyone. As a writer, you don’t expect a gymnast to listen to your content except they are also interested in writing. This is the same for other jobs and skills including the STEM professions. Another thing to consider is the age of people you’re creating content for. Obviously, content creation for a 50-year-old millennial will be different from one for a 20-year-old Gen Z. Other things to consider while researching your audience include gender, location, education, interests, values, lifestyle, beliefs, listening and viewing habits, and content preference.

Use surveys, social media insights, and other tools to get these data. Set out a plan for your podcast promotion and the next stages will eventually be easy because you now have a more tailored approach to your promotion strategies.

2. Choose the Right Platform

There are a lot of social media platforms out there and unless you want to waste so much time and money, you can’t share your content to all these platforms. Choosing the right platform for your audience means picking the exact social networks they spend most of their time on. This is another reason why in-depth research on your audience is extremely important.

Do your audience prefer continuous scrolling of short videos like TikTok videos and YouTube Shorts? Or do they prefer reading, liking, and reposting a tweet? These are some of the questions that you need to answer.

Diving deeper, publishing the same video content for your audience on TikTok and Instagram could seem reasonable and easy. But in reality, it might not work that way. People search for different things on different platforms and it’s your job as a podcaster to identify that and provide the needed content.

3. Use and Test Post Visuals

After choosing your audience’s most preferred platform, it’s time to focus on the type of content to create. Especially if you’re just starting, testing is a useful and efficient way to discover what your audience resonates with more. Try content formats like quotes, teasers, videos, podcast clips, and audiograms. After that, check your analytics to discover the format your audience loves the most.

4. Leverage Video Content

It’s no news that video content is the best way to grab the attention of viewers easily. As a podcaster, utilize and leverage videos for your social media marketing and podcast advertisement. If you have a video podcast, divide your long podcast into several clips and post them periodically on your social media platform. And if you have an audio podcast, convert your audio to video clips or audiograms (preferably 30-60 seconds). Tools like SoundMadeSeen can perfectly create video clips and audiograms for you to share with your audience and get more reach.

5. Schedule and Post your Content Consistently

Content creation is a game of consistent strategic planning and posting. Being creative is not enough. Build a strategy for content creation, scheduling, and posting to stay consistent and be at the top of your game. Create time to do your brainstorming, ideation, and planning to cater to the content needs for the coming months. A content ideation sheet could help you with this. The sheet should contain:

• Your content pillar
• Creative copy (the words of your post or content)
• Creative type (videos, posts, carousels, memes, etc)
• Creative direction (how the content should be)
• Final captions with hashtags

Another hack to grow your podcast on social media is consistently publishing your content. This is one of the reasons why your favorite content creators are having great results in what they do. Posting your content haphazardly disrupts your growth and reduces your chances of getting your content to the right audience. This is due to the constantly changing algorithms of social media platforms. A content calendar can keep you on track and let you know when to publish and schedule your posts appropriately.

6. Use hashtags and other social media optimization techniques

Optimizing your social media posts involves using attention-grabbing visuals, well-crafted captions, and posting your content at strategic timing. However, it is important to ensure that your branding across all platforms is consistent, including the use of specific keywords in your bio and post. This helps you build a recognizable online presence and makes it easier for potential listeners to find and follow your podcast.

Also, hashtags allow you to tap into existing conversations and trends to make your content discoverable to a broader audience beyond your immediate followers. Researching and including relevant hashtags connects your podcast with communities interested in your topics

7. Use Different Online Tools to Get Desired Results

The best part of social media marketing and promotion for your podcast is that there are several tools available to streamline your efforts and make your content quality better. For instance, you can create eye-catching shareable video clips, audiograms, and written content from your audio or video with tools like SoundMadeSeen. Scheduling tools like Buffer or Hootsuite allow you to plan and automate your posts to ensure consistent visibility without the need for constant manual updates. Analytics tools like Sprout Social, BuzzSumo, and HubSpot can help you track the performance of your posts and provide insights into what works best with your audience. Using these online tools in your social media strategy can efficiently promote your podcast and connect you with a larger audience.

8. Collaborate with your Guest

When a guest appears on your podcast, they bring their audience and followers along which is a great advantage for you if you utilize it well. After recording the episode, encourage your guest to share the content on their social media platforms. Provide them with easy-to-share assets, like promotional graphics, short video clips, or key quotes from the episode to make promotion easy for them. You can also create a ripple effect where both your audience and theirs become more engaged by tagging your guests and adding relevant hashtags to your post. The collaboration doesn’t help in promoting that specific episode alone but also builds a sense of community among your audience.

9. Be Patient

Success doesn't happen overnight—patience is important. Building an audience and gaining traction takes time, especially in a crowded digital landscape. All you have to do is share your episodes consistently, engage with your listeners, and experiment with different content formats to gradually increase your visibility. Social media algorithms often reward consistent posting. Staying persistent and giving your strategies time to work can make a significant difference. Remember to always refine your approach if you discover any change—either negative or positive.

10. Track your Progress

When promoting your podcast on social media, track your progress. It gives you an understanding of what strategies are working and where improvements are needed. Key metrics such as listener engagement, social media interactions, growth in followers, and so on can help you identify which platforms and content types resonate most with your audience. Additionally, tracking progress over time provides valuable insights into trends and audience behavior and helps you make informed decisions for sustained podcast growth.

Wrapping Up - Promoting your Podcast on Social Media

Promoting your podcast on social media never stops, it’s a continuous process. Engage with your followers, share valuable content, and continually experiment with different strategies to see what works best. Use tools that help you streamline your work and effort even on a tight budget. Finally, dedicate time and effort to social media promotion to significantly enhance your podcast’s visibility and success.