When using tweets to promote your podcast, it’s important to get creative and think beyond simply promoting your latest episode. Your social presence is more than promoting your latest content. It’s about building and strengthening your brand.
Your Twitter profile may be someone’s first impression of you and your show—make it reflect your brand and show some personality. Twitter is the perfect channel to try out new and creative ways to grow your audience as the lift to create content there is considerably low compared to other channels.
Here we’re taking a look at nine tweets to promote your podcast, including examples from popular shows using Twitter in unique ways to build momentum around a show.
1. Podcast Trailer
The idea of social media is that you’re constantly reaching new people who may have never heard of your show before. Or, maybe they only know your show by name from a recommendation from a friend.
Regularly reposting your podcast trailer or pinning it to the top of your profile makes it easier for new listeners to get to know you. And of course, we always recommend you use an audiogram to create your trailer. If you need some help, here are some tips for creating your first audiogram.
In this example from Headgum, introducing Keeping Records, the trailer is even more helpful as it’s such a niche topic that many audiences may not immediately understand.
2. Guest Announcements
If you have an interview-based show, your guests are your bread and butter—make ’em look good. This is another tweet type that audiograms work really well for. Showing your guest’s face automatically increases visual interest and potential for engagement. Create multiple tweets featuring your guest:
- Guest reveal (pre-air date): announce a new guest and provide background and context on who they are and what they’ll be discussing.
- Guest promo (pre-air date): sneak peek of the interview with a cliffhanger or juicy question.
- Release day: include links galore and a particularly interesting or funny snippet of your interview.
- Post-release: re-tweet your guest’s tweets and sprinkle one or two more snippets from your interview into your feed using audiograms.
The Laverne Cox Show does a fantastic job of quickly hooking you with their guest and giving you plenty of context for the episode.
3. New Listener Intro
As content creators, we’re constantly trying to reach new audiences, but we don’t always remember to continue to talk to them directly. Keeping that in mind, it’s important to embrace new fans and engage with them regularly. Welcome them to the fold, so to speak.
For podcasts with large back catalogs or those that have recently joined a new network, it’s helpful to give the listener some tips on where to start.
In this case, Nicole Byer’s podcast Why Won’t You Date Me recently moved to Conan O’Brien’s Team Coco Podcasts. With more than 170 episodes, providing the listener with some top episodes that give you a better feel for the show is such a smart move.
4. Play up your theme!
Creating great tweets to promote your podcast doesn’t always mean promoting your show directly. In this example from Welcome to the Boomtown, a podcast on all things 80s music, you’ll often see them commemorate album releases and post fun trivia from the 1980s.
Say you’ve got a show about gardening. You could share a unique plant species or tweet reminders for planting seasons of certain plants and veggies.
Your podcast is about a topic you’re passionate about—share your passion not just your content.
5. Behind the scenes
Think about your favorite podcasts—you feel like you start to get to know the hosts you listen to regularly. Even if that feeling is subconscious, you create a sense of belonging and feel passionate about the show (or at least I do).
And I’m not the only one. When researching this phenomenon, I came across an article from NPR that perfectly summed up what I’m trying to describe. In “It’s All In Your Head: The One-Way Intimacy Of Podcast Listening” Glen Weldon describes his love of podcasts:
Listening to a favorite podcast — whether you do it over the course of years, months or hours — engenders a powerful sense of intimacy. You come to know the hosts’ tastes, their tics, the phrases they overuse. As they unthinkingly dole out tiny, incremental parcels of information about their personal lives — a new baby here, a beloved pet’s passing there — you realize one day that your brain has unthinkingly constructed exhaustive virtual dossiers on each of them.
– Glen Weldon
Your listeners are making a conscious choice to seek out your content and get to know you. Letting them get to know you beyond your voice is a powerful way to build a community for your podcast.
In this example from Samin Nosrat and Hrishikesh Hirway, co-hosts of Home Cooking, they not only give you an endearing look behind recording, but they also promote their merch at the same time!
6. Talk to your fans
Encourage your fans to talk to you! Getting your fans involved by asking them for their feedback or prompting them with questions is a great way to increase Twitter engagement. There’s always the option to add incentive by potentially being on (or having their response read on) the show.
Here, Lovett or Leave It listeners are encouraged to reach out if they’re fans of The Bachelor franchise. Remember, your listeners can also help you develop your content and ensure you’re creating content they’re interested in.
7. Explain with a visual
Some of y’all are out here talking about extremely detailed and complicated topics with timelines and characters galore. Help your listeners out! Give them something to help them visualize what or who you’re talking about.
Providing a visual is also another opportunity to promote your episode softly. What I mean by that is the episode link is there—but the visual is doing the hard work for you. It hooks the reader and makes them want to learn more about what they’re looking at.
This amazing example from Mission To Mars | How to Land on the Red Planet helps you understand the extremely detailed and technical topic of landing on Mars.
8. Give ’em some extras
If your podcast’s topic lends itself to it, providing supplementary extras or tools that listeners can use is a nice bonus that keeps them connected to your show.
In this example, it’s actually a listener who’s providing the extra inspired by Happier with Gretchen Rubin, but you could easily create something like this as well. Assets like checklists, worksheets, spreadsheets, and PDFs are a great way to reinforce your topic and give the listener something useful.
Bonus tip: be sure to brand these assets. You want them to remember you and your show when they’re using or sharing them.
9. Something to look forward to (other than a new episode)
Your podcast takes a lot of time and preparation that may not leave a lot of time for other content. Find ways to create useful and well-thought-out content that’s an easy lift to support your pod.
We’ve seen this type of content take over social media before…think #throwbackthursday, #givingtuesday, or #motivationmonday. You can build momentum around something you share every week at the same time.
In this example from Ten Percent Happier, they started sharing #TuesdayTips, where they provide a meditation tip every Tuesday helping people on their journey to learn to meditate.
Find content you can easily create, pick a day of the week, and be consistent.
When it comes to using tweets to promote your podcast, take chances and try new things. Twitter is great for experimenting thanks to its fast pace and relatively low lift for creating new content.
