How are podcasters and radio stations using social media - and just what are audiograms?
To find the answers, I spoke to Delaney Simmons from WNYC, the largest talk radio station in the United States. We talked about the futures of both radio and podcasting, and how they're using social media to deliver their content.
What are your Social Media Objectives at WNYC?
"I think our objectives are two-fold. First, we work really hard to find new audiences both for local radio programming and for our on-demand podcasting. Seeking new audiences on social media is kind of hard for radio as you're not clicking over from anywhere. If you're listening to a piece of content, we have to be very clear about what we want you do. So you might hear at the end of a Brian Lehrer Program, "Follow us at WNYC."
So we're really trying to find unique opportunities for fans of our audio programming and of our podcasts to come over on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and see what we're doing and our unique offerings there. And I think that we have to be really creative about what we're doing there because audio content isn't visual. We sort of have an uphill battle when it comes to visualizing our audio content and a picture of someone in the studio, as you probably know, just isn't as engaging as we want it to be.
So that's one of our biggest challenges and our objectives are bringing people back over and then also finding new people and creating that feedback loop from the audio to social media and from social media back to our audio."
What Social Channel is Most Important to WNYC and why?
"The WNYC Instagram is a really unique place. If people want to go check it out, we post pictures of weird things that we see around the city, like a mattress on the street that says "Free Hugs", or "You're Beautiful" or something like that. So there's just like quirky, weirdy New York moments that is captured there. It really speaks the tone of our audio.
You want to Drive People Back to the Full Audio Content - how can you Track this and how can you Calculate the ROI on Social Media in general?
"It's a lot of estimation. I think in podcasting, we're still in the wild wild west of analytics. Everyone's measuring a download or listen a little bit differently. But from social media, we do see number of clicks. We don't know if they clicked over and listened but number of clicks is a pretty good estimation of how many people got to that landing page where the long form audio does live. So we shorten all of our links and we track click-throughs that way. Video.twitter.com and also Facebook Native have the ability to do a custom call to action which is like a link overlay on top of your videos."
How can new Podcasters Attract Listeners While Moving Beyond Just the Sound?
"I think it is still a pay-to-play situation. Social buying has become incredibly inexpensive especially on Facebook. We still see Twitter as being a little bit more expensive. But doing highly targeted posts on Facebook can be really effective to get people aware of what you're working on. We always start with a really great influencer strategy. It's the same in any industry, but if you can get some big people or some big brands excited about what you're doing, if you can work on booking the right people that have a large social following to post about your new episode, I think that's still a best practice that we should all be following. I don't have a ton of Twitter followers but I will post about this episode when it's live. And if I did have a ton of followers, that would be an awareness for my audience in that regard."
- Our tip of the week is Sponsored Geofilters on Snapchat
- This week's big shout goes out to Carlos E. Valdivia
- Follow Delaney on Twitter @delaneysocial
- Read the full article on the Link Humans blog