A client asked me the other day about hiring a social media agency.
An agency promising to get far more engagement on her content.
The idea is for them to push out content across multiple pages and platforms. Lots of pushing. It’s a very appealing idea, too. Your content…everywhere.
Who doesn’t want to be everywhere?
Yet I think the days of pushing content on people are over, at least for the time being.
And agencies are still selling the dream, mostly based on success stories from 3+ years ago.
Why does this matter? Because it affects everything about how you approach growing your podcast or marketing your business.
Here’s the big idea for today: There was a sweet spot in social media where you could “push” your content out to people. That sweet spot is over.
For organic content, that sweet spot lasted around 10 years.
The front end of that period was roughly marked by the launch of Gary Vee’s book “Crush It” in 2009 and Grant Cardone’s book “10X” in 2011. Those books are now 10+ years old.
Since then, social media companies have continued to tweak their algorithm.
Their mission is to keep eyes on the platform which they can monetize with ads.
So we saw things start to change with organic social content.
Anything that sent people off-platform or got “low engagement” was downplayed or even punished.
- YouTube videos stopped playing natively inside Facebook.
- When you tried to post a YouTube video or podcast episode to Facebook, you got these boring looking posts that got low engagement. The post basically guaranteed you had no shot at going viral.
- Facebook devalued their Business pages with algorithm changes. Guaranteeing that most people don’t see business page content. It just wasn’t as engaging as Facebook wanted.
- Inside of Facebook Groups, we saw opinion posts do far better, while teaching posts get buried by the algorithm.
So now, organic content has to get instant engagement…or your post dies.
I saw one coach online talking about how they loved their podcast agency because they put up these “beautiful clips of their podcast” on places like Instagram.
When I went to her Instagram profile, I found that those “beautiful posts” averaged under 100 views and had minimal engagement compared to posts that were more authentic and off-the-cuff.
(Of course, there’s a role for an agency to post for you, but that role has changed over the years. More on that below.)
Social media companies like Facebook have set the standard for the type of content they want.
Content that is…
- created by you in real-time
- on their platform
- using in-app tools
- exclusively and custom tailored to their platform
- that generates instant engagement (which skews toward negative emotions)
So the landscape has shifted away from the “10X” approach. Creating one piece of content and pushing it out to every platform doesn’t work the way it used to.
Those posts didn’t get the right kind of engagement, so those posts now are mostly seen by you – the account owner – along with the 150 people you engage with the most. Those are probably people you already know.
So to you, you might see all this content going out everywhere.
But most of your followers never see that content, because the social media companies bury it with the algorithm.
Now what does all this have to do with push and pull?
The challenge in growing a podcast or even your company has shifted.
It’s no longer about pushing out content in an attempt to be “everywhere” on social media.That approach simply doesn’t work, because the social media companies changed their algorithm to guarantee it doesn’t work.
So the marketing challenge has shifted to, How do we create content that people pull toward them?
Because if someone isn’t on the other end, pulling our content toward them, the game is rigged. We’ve already lost.
That’s why it’s so critical to choose the right niche – a fast growing niche – for your business and especially your podcast.
When there’s a growing buzz and excitement around a newer niche, people are seeking out content. They’re pulling content toward them. Looking for podcasts or videos or articles. They can’t get enough.
Your goal is to simply position yourself in the places where people are looking for content, and give them something Clear & Compelling.
That’s a strategy that works in an era when pushing content no longer does.
Now I mentioned earlier that you can have these beautiful clips of your podcast go out on social media and they get very little engagement.
So how has that affected our done-for-your podcast service?
The answer is that we recommended against those types of audiogram posts years ago, and shifted as many clients as possible to video highlight clips, natively uploaded wherever we can. Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc.
It’s not a perfect solution, yet highlight clips give you the best chance of having something reach more than 150 of your followers, or be discovered on a platform like YouTube with good headlines and good SEO.
We also post 1-3 quote graphics to support each new episode launch, but with the understanding that these are just little billboards that scroll past people’s feeds. We don’t expect or promise that those posts get a ton of engagement.
The real work of promoting individual episodes comes down to email (which we also take care of for our clients), word of mouth from your fans, and guests promoting their episode, again mostly through email.
If you want to explore what it looks like for us to do literally everything for you in your podcast, from guest booking to email marketing and video highlight clips for social media, just grab a Brainstorm call. We’ll chat about your podcast idea, your potential to reach a fast-growing niche, and see if a podcast can bring a 10X return on your investment.
I’ll leave you with this.
The game has changed. And it’s not just affecting how podcasts are marketed. These are massive changes in the social media landscape that have a ton of implications for how marketing will be done over the next 5-10 years.
If you have this insight, you can turn your attention away from the social media rat race and toward things that actually grow your business, put money in your pocket and impact people around the world.
And do it all with calm, confidence and clarity.