Episode 9: Getting the Word Out -Promo Sharing

Introduction

THOMAS: Welcome to POD Ask Us.

CHERYL: Isn’t it POD Access?

THOMAS: Can’t it be both?

CHERYL: Connecting d/Deaf and disabled podcasters to audiences and each other.

THOMAS: Ba-dum-dum bap-bah-dum.

CHERYL: [happy giggle]

CHERYL: Even though we’re wearing these really dark shirts, I think we should be very transparent.

THOMAS: I thought we’d been doing that. So tell me, what color shirt should I have worn?

BOTH: [chuckle]

CHERYL: I’m not talking about your shirt! Yes, your shirt is black, and mine is dark gray with a turtleneck. But I’m talking about the other kind of being transparent. We need to be transparent about our take on today’s topic: social media.

THOMAS: Okay, here’s transparent for you. Yuck!

BOTH: [laugh]

CHERYL: Exactly! Ooh! There are some people who love social media and are great at using it. Wow! I think it’s important for anyone listening, reading, or watching this episode to realize, uh, not everyone is all excited about social media.

THOMAS: In fact, this episode is probably even more important for anyone who feels similar to you and I.

CHERYL: Why don’t we start there? What’s your beef with social media?

THOMAS: It’s really time consuming. So much of it doesn’t feel real. I know for me, it sometimes feels like the likes don’t equate to people actually consuming the podcast.

CHERYL: And it’s not just us. Qudsiya from Down to the Struts shared her feelings on social.

QUDSIYA: I personally have a lot of discomfort with social media, but I understand that it’s a really important way, particularly with the disability community, to communicate. It’s a very important vehicle to our community. And so, I do use it, but I use it very sparingly. I have a lot of trouble using it. Just the speed of it I find really overwhelming, especially with Twitter. Everything happens so fast, and I get tongue tied about what to say and how to say it and how to contribute to the conversation ‘cause it’s all moving so quickly. I have my own sort of hangups about it, which are very personal to me.

THOMAS: Good thing we have Sofia Webster returning to help us try to feel a little better or at least come to an understanding about social media.

CHERYL: If you missed the last episode on branding, you should probably pause this episode, check that one out, and then come right back.

THOMAS: I think we should wait for them.

CHERYL: Yeah, we can do that!

THOMAS: Pause here, and we’ll wait. [Jeopardy think music plays] Okay, great. Now that you’re back, let’s return to Sofia.

First things First

SOFIA: Social media is my favorite topic [delighted laugh] to talk about. I find branding to be a process that builds upon itself. To be able to give guidance around what to do on social media, for example, you first have to take a step back and answer those fundamental self-interview style questions. Because once you have the basis of that, you can start building something called a brand strategy.

THOMAS: Some of the questions include: What’s the goal of your podcast? What sets you apart from other podcasts?

CHERYL: What’s the vibe of your podcast? How could you sum up your show in one phrase?

SOFIA: So, deciding, okay, if this is our brand purpose statement, how does that translate into the type of work we put in the world? I can’t decide what’s on social media until first I decide what type of work I wanna put in the world.

THOMAS: When you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense.

CHERYL: So does having something to fall back on as a reminder or a way to orient yourself when things get off track or feel too complicated.

THOMAS: You’re talking about your lighthouse!

CHERYL: Exactly.

THOMAS: Identifying your vibe, your tone dictates your presence on social media.

CHERYL: If you have a serious, no-nonsense type of vibe on your podcast, then your social media presence should reflect that.

SOFIA: I would recommend that whatever branding aesthetics you have on your website also carry over to your social media or vice versa. Maybe you don’t have a website. You start with an Instagram, and then you’re like, okay, I wanna expand onto a website. The website and the social media should be consistent. The branding should be consistent across everything you do, including social media.

Personal vs. Podcast Presence

THOMAS: Now let me preface this next question by first acknowledging that I know it’s not grammatically correct. Who is the “you”?

CHERYL: Are you referring to the difference between someone’s personal presence on social versus the podcast having a separate presence or brand?

THOMAS: Yeah, exactly. I began promoting my podcast through my personal social media before I created a separate account for the podcast.

CHERYL: That could make total sense, especially if your personal vibe matches that of your podcast.

KEITH: Our social media is kind of built off of our individual social media presence. We do use our social media connections ‘cause we are plugged into various disability groups, hashtag groups, Facebook groups. We have a history, and we have a following. We have sort of a built-in base of listeners. We’re very active on social media. We usually start promoting the new podcast two weeks out. Once we record it, then we start promoting it. And then it ramps up.

THOMAS: That was Keith Jones from Black Disabled Men Talk.

CHERYL: Maya from the Proud Stutter podcast shows there are opportunities to switch social media profiles.

MAYA: I actually converted my personal account to [chuckles] Proud Stutter. I didn’t wanna lose all the people I already had. And so, I created a separate personal, private account, and that seems to be working well. I don’t really use Instagram except to promote Proud Stutter stuff anyway.

Platforms, templates, and aesthetics

THOMAS: No matter what you decide works best for you and your situation, as Sofia tells us, creating a consistent tone is important.

SOFIA: I find it a helpful order to do things would be to first establish what your brand strategy is. Then create a brand voice guide. Once you’ve identified the voice, it will be easier to decide what kind of language that you use that is in line with the voice.

THOMAS: I was ahead of the game. I immediately knew I was gonna use English for my social media!

CHERYL: I don’t think that’s what she meant?

THOMAS: Oh, no?

CHERYL: I’m pretty sure she’s talking about casual versus a more professional vibe.

THOMAS: Okay, that makes sense. So if your podcast is tackling serious subjects, you shouldn’t be all silly on social.

CHERYL: Exactly!

SOFIA: And once you have that, then you could start doing a social media plan with things like what type of platforms do I wanna be on?

CHERYL: Figuring out where your potential audience is most active.

THOMAS: If you’re not someone already active and aware of your potential audience on a given platform, this can take some significant research and time to familiarize yourself with the app itself.

CHERYL: The accessibility of the platform itself can, unfortunately, dictate what you can use.

SOFIA: Once you have your social media strategy down, then I would start doing things like thinking about aesthetics. One thing that I recommend is creating some social media asset templates for your graphics and whatnot. We have that for LaVant Consulting. If you really start studying our Instagram feed, for example, you’re gonna notice some patterns and some similar type of template after a while. That is by design to make our lives easier as social media content creators, but also, for the consistency of the branding and the story that we wanna tell. We try to incorporate a lot of disability community voices, issues that are important to the community, and trying to do that in an intersectional way that highlights that ableism is a social justice issue. That’s really critical to our brand, so we try to hit on that as much as we can.

It’s gotta be like a stepped process. Like, if you try to jump to the end of the book, you can, but it’s probably going to be tricky, and you may end up scratching your head in a few months like, “Oh, what should I post? I don’t know.” But if you had done the pre-work, it will become easier for you.

CHERYL: I can attest to the fact that if you get to the end of the book, and you’re like, “I’m just gonna post on Twitter,” but you don’t have a plan, you don’t have a voice and a strategy, you’re gonna do what I do, which is close Twitter without having posted anything.

SOFIA: [laughs]

CHERYL: So, I don’t have the positive example, but I firmly can attest to the negative example. That’s part of my barrier. And I didn’t know it ‘til I was today years old, and you just said all this.

SOFIA: Thinking through your goals is really gonna help shape what you end up posting. ‘Cause social media comes naturally to a lot of people, but it doesn’t for other people. It can be a really scary, scary place, especially Twitter.com is a scary place right now [laughs] because of all of the upheavals going on in that company.

THOMAS: Some of the upheaval I experienced around the app formerly known as Twitter was due to it blocking other applications from accessing its API. Basically, I once was able to automate my posts without paying for another application. When access to the API was removed, it changed my entire process.

CHERYL: Ugh! There are paid apps that allow you to plan and streamline your social media posting. And Sofia’s suggestion of creating templates can save a lot of time and energy that you can use on your strategy, or hey, on your podcast!

THOMAS: Another way to reduce the stress of social media: Bring someone on board to help manage the process.

CHERYL: That could work in various ways. Maybe you hire someone to develop a plan and some templates. It could become really manageable if you plan ahead and use templates with an app where you can pre-schedule posts.

THOMAS: Otherwise, you may wanna hire someone to manage the full process. Maybe you can find someone to barter with. You edit their podcast, and they post your social media content?

More than Likes

CHERYL: Wow, I have to admit this is starting to seem less daunting.

THOMAS: I just don’t see value in people “liking” social media posts if they’re not actually consuming the podcast.

SOFIA: That is called conversion rate! There are two types of analytics to track: engagement metrics, which includes things like likes and shares and follows and replies and retweets and all that. Which are good, but they don’t mean very much on their own. If you’re trying to have another purpose here, which it sounds like is to get people to listen to the podcast, that is what’s called a business metric. Every website has a way to track how much traffic is coming into the website and from where. So, if you could track on the back end of your website, where am I getting my traffic from, and it’s twitter.com, then that means that something is going well. But if Twitter or your other social platforms aren’t even on the top ten, it sounds like they’re not clicking through. Some of these social media platforms are, unfortunately, I hate to say it, a pay-to-play type of place. So, LinkedIn especially, I notice that a lot. Our content does so much better on LinkedIn when we put money behind it and run some ads.

You have a superstar guest. Oprah Winfrey is coming on the pod! Oh, my god! And we really, really want people to hear my conversation with Oprah. I would consider setting aside something of an ad budget to boost the posts, so they get in more people’s feeds. And then you can get more link clicks, and you could customize the ads to ensure that they are getting the type of traction that you want. You can make the ad geared towards link clicks. You can have it be subscribes or likes on your posts or follows. It’s kind of creepy, actually, [giggles] from a marketing perspective, like, oh god, I have a lot of very creepy power to influence my voice in other people’s feeds. But that’s the marketing game for you.

THOMAS: No disrespect to Oprah, but as I step into my lighthouse, it’s evident that she’s not the right guest for my podcast. My guests are just about always personally impacted by disability. But let’s be for real. If Oprah wants to come on the pod, I’ll consider making an exception. Oprah? Holla! [delighted laugh]

[dreamy electronic music break]

Wrap-up

CHERYL: So, how are you feeling about social media now, after Sofia helped shine a light on all that will make it more manageable?

THOMAS: I think planning can go a long way. Strategizing, creating templates, and automating where possible, that could be a real game changer. What sort of techniques are you using to make social media work for you and your podcast? Have you found a strategy that works well for you?

CHERYL: Let us know.

THOMAS: Go to PODAccess.net and hit the Contact Us button.

CHERYL: And you can upload a voice memo or write a message.

THOMAS: And you might just hear it,

CHERYL: read it,

THOMAS: or see it in a future episode of the podcast or on social media.

CHERYL: Tell a friend and an enemy to follow or subscribe to POD Access wherever you get your podcasts and on Instagram @ThePODAccess. That’s @ T H E P O D A C C E S S.

THOMAS: PODAccess.net.

CHERYL: Meow.