As Podcasters we all know that growing our social media following is important, but it's also time consuming. Evergreen posting addresses a key problem with social media: If you don't promote your content often enough, it will quickly fade into obscurity. And promoting the same thing over and over again gets exhausting and boring.
As Season 1 of the “Podcasting Strategy” show is drawing to a close, today’s episode focuses on the way we try to achieve a number of goals when it comes to social media publishing for ourselves and our clients:
- Schedule promotion of new podcast episodes or blog posts for a long period, say 6 months. On auto-pilot.
- Re-Promote our back-catalog of previous episodes or posts.
- Spend less time doing so.
- Generating more likes, retweets and shares.
- Keeping it interesting for our audience, and building interesting social feeds in the process.
- Learn which content is most effective.
- Categorize social shares and follow different schedules for each.
Table Of Contents
- Some Context: Publishing vs Engagement [01:49]
- Four Typical Podcaster Social Media Challenges [03:41]
- Six Podcast Social Media Automation Needs [07:20]
- Our Choice For Evergreen Posting On Social Media: SmarterQueue [12:20]
- Episode Links and Resources
Some Context: Publishing vs Engagement
Those of you have followed us here at Polymash know that we are somewhat skeptical when it comes to relying on Social Media alone to drive podcast growth, unless you have a really large audience already. This is why we are so focused on SEO, Influencer Marketing and other strategies that don’t rely on existing followers to take action or help you “go viral”, which seldom happens.
Social Media publishing vs managing engagement
But that does not ever mean we ignore social media. In fact, growing a dedicated audience can be the most impactful growth factor.
I categorize social media activities into 2 main activities: Publishing and Managing Engagement.
Publishing is a necessary element, but engagement is where growth comes from. Following, responding and actually being human on your social media channels can never be replaced by automation. Well, maybe never say never, a lot of our episodes are about AI tools, but for now, my opinion is that it cannot. So for our clients, our philosophy is to automate the publishing part as much as possible, in order to increase their available time spent on the engagement part.
Evergreen posting of variations
At Polymash we are not social media managers. We do not get involved in managing engagement, following or liking or replying on behalf of our clients. But we do handle content creation and the scheduling and automation of podcast promotions on social media for our clients. And evergreen posting of social media variations are an important aspect of this we examine a little more closely in this episode.
Four Typical Podcaster Social Media Challenges
As a podcast production agency for the last 10 years we have seen certain patterns on social media:
1. Under-promoting
Most people under-promote their podcast episode or blog article. We see people post only a few times during the first week or month.
It always amazes me how much time people spend preparing and creating content, and how little time is spent on promoting it consistently.
But personally I'm guilty of the same phenomenon: I worry about "over-sharing". Or maybe I’m just too lazy or tired after the effort of getting new episodes out. But the truth in recent years is this: Most social media channels now have a shortened half-life, especially on Twitter and LinkedIn.
The concept of “Half Life” on Social Media
Half-life is an interesting measure. No, this isn’t about radioactivity. It’s the amount of time it takes for a post to receive half of its total engagements.
- Twitter half-life is around 21 minutes
- A Facebook post's half-life is around 30 minutes.
- LinkedIn is a little better, it lasts around 19 hours.
- YouTube and Pinterest have the longest "shelf life" at 6 days and 3.5 months, respectively
For these half-life data driven reasons, sharing more frequently on most platforms makes sense.
But how often is often enough, and how often is too much?
2. Not recycling or using evergreen posting
Post recycling is the idea of sharing the same link to our episode or blog more often, so that more people in our audience have the chance to see it.
But there is a rub: You cannot simply re-share the exact same content. Many platforms such as twitter will block or shadow-ban you if you post exact duplicate content.
So how can we re-use and re-cycle without being boring?
3. Boring your audience
It's hard to keep it interesting. We all see so many podcasts and blogs share their latest content in the exact same, predictable way, with the same brand imagery.
The most successful social media accounts seem to have a variety of post types to keep it interesting.
What if there was an easy way to spice things up, and also learn about what works and what doesn't?
4. Never considering what the analytics tell us
Many social media tools offer us some sort of analytics. And when was the last time we looked at those analytics of our social channels, and considered what resonates with our audience the most? And made some changes based on this?
Six Podcast Social Media Automation Needs
1. Post Scheduling & Content Calendar
This is the ability to schedule posts in the future, and manage future posts on a content calendar.
2. Content Categories
Ability to categorize our social shares and have a separate posting schedule for each. For example, we would want to schedule "quotes" type posts less frequently than sharing our episodes or own blog posts.
3. Evergreen posting and post recycling
Typically less than 5% of our audience will see our posts, and only if they happen to be online soon after we post them. When we recycle a post, it will likely be seen by new parts of our audience. That means we can get up to 10x more likes and shares than posting just once. Here is a graphic from the SmarterQueue tool we like to use that illustrates the lift in shares and engagement that recycling can produce.
PS, visit the links and resources section for this episode for info, pricing etc.
4. Finding And Using Images
I'm fine with using external sources to find social media images, occasionally. But I really appreciate platforms that can
- detect and re-use images already used in a URL or website post,
- and also give me a variety of other ways to directly use royalty free images from sources such as Unsplash, Pixabay, Giphy etc.
5. Use of Video & Carousel Posts
Video is of course hugely engaging. Repurposing podcasting content in video formats was the subject of episode 5 entitled "Ways To Repurpose Podcast Content In Growing A YouTube Channel"
While longer form videos go on YouTube, the rise of social vide short formats has been explosive. So being able to schedule video content to Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn is key for us.
Videos are also huge on Instagram. We previously mentioned that the half-life for engagement on Instagram and YouTube are much better than Twitter and Facebook.
And I consider "Carousel" and multi image “Story Posts” another must-have for a good social media scheduling platform.
6. Analytics & Monitoring
Compare the engagement between your content types, so you know what works best with your audience.
Our Choice For Evergreen Posting On Social Media: SmarterQueue
Here is how we landed on SmarterQueue as our social scheduling platform:
Being a tools geek and an agency owner has led me to try a ton of different tools over the years. I LOVE to talk about all and any of them, they all are very good and have areas of strengths and weaknesses. So hit me up with any questions you might have if you are using any of these platforms. I have personally used Buffer, Hootsuite, Social Bee, Recurpost, Coschedule, Missinglettr and several new AI posting platforms like AIKontent.
But we have always come back to SmarterQueue because of its unique combination of features and the best evergreen post generator we have seen.
SmarterQueue features at a glance
- Content Categories
- Evergreen Recycling
- Content Curation
- Visual Calendar
- Analytics
- Publishing
- Social Inbox
- Competitor Analysis
- Social Media Monitoring
- Instagram Scheduler
How and why we use SmarterQueue
With Smarter Queue, we can recycle a podcast episode post multiple times. Evergreen posting reaches different parts of our audience. Each time we recycle a post, it will be seen by new parts of our audience. This means we can easily get up to 10x more likes and shares than posting just once.
Post variations are critical in generating an interesting timeline, and not running afoul of platform duplicate content rules.
Each post variation is a combination of different images and different content.
Smarter Queue is brilliant at speedily finding images. These can come either from the post or online image libraries. Automating the evergreen posting schedule of these variations plays out over long period of times. This is ideal for podcast back-catalog promotion.
And, this does NOT have to be a lot of work.
For example, with SmarterQueue we can craft 5 text posts, quick-select 4 images, and this results in 20 different post variations.
Assuming we have a podcast that releases each week, a 6 month content calendar will cycle through 480 very different looking posts.
This will result in a treasure trove of analytics data to study as well, and we will learn what engages our audience the most.
Instagram carousel post and story support
We also love the fact that we can create Instagram story and multi image carousel posts and scheduled these. Here is an example:
Content category support
Lastly we love that each different post type can have it's own unique calendar schedule to keep things balanced. So if I want to have a "quotes" category schedule that only posts once or twice a week, not problem. With separate Queues and Posting Plans for each Category, we can easily achieve the expert-recommended ratio of content types, and give your audience a balanced mix.
One tip: We have setup high frequency and low frequency categories. So initially, a post or episode gets placed into the high frequency promotion schedule, but after 3 weeks we can move it into a low frequency category.
- Sidenote: This concept is implemented more elegantly on some other platforms. MissingLettr for example automatically can change the frequency over time.
Over To You
We obviously love SmarterQueue, but the best part of being a podcast agency is that we meet so many other interesting and experienced podcasters. So I would love to hear from you: Which social media tools work best for your show? And what are some of the favorite social media evergreen posting platforms you use?
Evergreen Posting Episode Links and Resources
- Smarter Queue. Disclosure: This resource contains an affiliate link, and we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase, at no extra cost to you.
- Ways To Repurpose Podcast Content In Growing A YouTube Channel (Season 1, Episode 5)
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