Creating a Podcast: Promotion and Evaluation

How do you get your podcast to your desired audience? Word of mouth through friends, family and colleagues is helpful but may not be sufficient.

Do you, or your organization, have a social media presence you can avail of? 

Examples: 
Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube. Or institutional newsletters, bulletins perhaps?

Are there media organisations that might find your project of interest and help promote it through news pieces, web features or articles? Or through their social media tools? Do you have professional counterparts who could help? People are often happy to assist if you get in touch with news of your work.

If you’re creating a podcast as part of your professional work, it presents great additional content for your social media streams.

Examples: 
Each month when the Blúiríní Béáloidis podcast is released the National Folklore Collection takes that month’s theme as a weekly theme for its Facebook and Twitter accounts. This then allows them to promote the episode, as well as having an opportunity to share some of the additional material they couldn't include in the episode. Thus nothing is ever wasted.

Facebook also allows you to add a little extra context to your posts if desired whilst Twitter prefers short snappy snippets. 

You might also like to think about where to offer additional resources connected to your podcast episodes. Are there further readings listeners might be interested in, or sound recordings? Where will you highlight these? Could you offer these on your website, social media platforms or an external blog?

If you’re creating your podcast as part of your professional work, it will be important to keep track of its operation and effectiveness for employer feedback. 

Platform Analytics
Hosting sites such as Soundcloud allow you to track listening figures, listener locations, the numbers of plays, and the number of likes for each episode in order to help paint a picture of audience behaviour. It also allows for audience comments. From these details you can create weekly or monthly reports for your records.

Sites such as Facebook and Twitter allow you to gauge more anecdotal evidence by recording the level of reaction and interaction with your podcast-related posts

You learn by doing. Each episode will offer lessons as to what works and what doesn’t. Be awake to these, and also listen to constructive feedback from listeners regarding sound quality, topic choices and so on.