Promoting your podcast on social media is necessary to grow your total listeners, but it can be tricky to figure out what to post. How do you engage readers and viewers with just audio clips?
An audiogram of a podcast helps you share your content in an engaging way for all of your social media followers. It’s a great way to take the content you’ve already created and showcase the best parts in an engaging and effective medium. A podcast audiogram is actually quite simple to make, too. You can create one with the help of any number of awesome, easy-to-use programs.
This article will help you learn what audiograms are, why they matter, the best practices for making an audiogram, and how exactly to make one. All of this will enable you to grow the listenership of your podcast and find a new, wider audience for your brand.
What is an Audiogram?
An audiogram of a podcast is a short video that features a still image, moving soundwaves, transcription of audio, and a short amount of audio from the podcast itself. They function like commercials or even movie trailers. They give your audience a very short glimpse into your podcast—just enough to get people intrigued, and wanting to listen to more. Here are a few features of podcast audiograms:
Visual Elements
Audiograms also bring a visual element to a podcast and are thus perfect for promoting your podcast on visual-heavy social media feeds. You’ll often find audiograms with an interesting image that’s relevant to the podcast at hand, like an old photograph for a history podcast, or a film still for a podcast about movies. The pictures help attract social media users, who may find a certain type of content relevant to their interests.
Sound Waves
These clips also feature sound waves, which often stand out on a typical social media feed. The transcriptions provide a great way for someone to read the content of a podcast without having to listen to anything—someone could be in a situation where playing audio isn’t advisable, or they could be deaf or hard of hearing. Audiograms help to bring in these types of listeners, who may otherwise not take an interest in your podcast.
Enhance Your Marketing Toolkit
An audiogram is an amazing marketing tool. This visual soundbite allows you to get creative with some of your best content. With just a short clip of your most enticing lines of audio, you can make a teaser trailer for a wide audience. If you’re struggling with turning raw content into an engaging marketing strategy that drives targeted engagement and establishes you as a thought leader in your field, get in touch with Invested Talent today. We can help you to repurpose your amazing existing content to grow your brand awareness and identity!
Why Audiograms Matter
Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and even Twitter are highly visual platforms. Images and videos go a long way towards expanding your following on these sites and apps.
People, too, are highly visual in general. So much of the brain is devoted to visual processing. In fact, the majority of information transmitted to the human brain is visual. We see things before we take in any other stimuli, and we’re wired to do so.
Neuroscience can back up the importance of taking in visual information, and other work and science confirms this. According to BrainRules, when you hear a piece of information, you’ll only remember about 10% of it after three days. When this same information is paired with an image, you’ll then be able to remember 65%. That’s a huge difference in recollection! A podcast may seem like a purely auditory experience, but with an audiogram, it doesn’t have to be.
Audiograms Enhance Brand Identity and Engagement
Put yourself in the shoes of the average social media user. You’re either passively or actively scrolling your various feeds, looking for something interesting, or just looking for something to distract you. A visual is immediately stimulating, and the right visual can snatch your attention for a few minutes. When coupled with interesting audio, you can see immediate returns on your social media engagement, as well as your listenership statistics. And, moreover, people will remember this image more easily than they’ll remember text or audio—if you want people to come back and revisit your content, an audiogram is a great way to do so.
In fact, when New York Public Radio, WNYC, began posting audiograms on their social media feeds, they saw an explosion in their engagement. On Twitter, posts with audiograms get 8x the engagement than posts without audiograms get. This speaks to how well audiograms work as visual stimuli, and as a marketing tool.
How to Maximize the Reach of Your Audiogram
It’s incredibly important to make audiograms for each episode of your podcast. This will help you promote your podcast consistently, and by producing more content, you’ll gain more and more listeners and followers.
But it’s just as important to make sure your audiograms are of good quality. A weak visual, a poor sample of audio, an unnatural size of an image—all of these can immediately diminish how many people are engaging with your work. Below is a list of what needs to be taken into account when creating your audiogram.
Make Sure the Aspect Ratio is Right For Each Social Media Platform
Different social media platforms have different video formats and dimensions. You don’t want to share a landscape-style video on Instagram–the format is completely wrong! Square videos (with a 1:1 ratio) tend to outperform landscape videos across social media platforms. But certain applications, such as IGTV and TikTok, don’t accommodate the square format as easily. YouTube, too, doesn’t favor square-shaped videos. You can edit and crop your audiogram video to make sure that the format is correct for each different platform. The most effective aspect ratios are:
- Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram feeds: square, or 1:1
- Instagram stories, IGTV, Tiktok, or SnapChat: vertical, or 4:3
- YouTube, or other video-sharing platforms: landscape, or 16:9
Select the Right Image
As we’ve noted, people respond to good visuals. You want to make sure that the picture you choose is relevant to your podcast content. If you’re talking about a subject, like TV or popular culture, that features a bevy of recognizable images, you’re in luck! But some topics are harder to find eye-catching visual content for, so it’s worthwhile finding out what people most respond to when they first see it.
If you’re using your podcast to further develop your brand, you want to use graphic design that is consistent with your typical visual imagery. This will help your followers deepen their understanding of your brand’s voice on a visual level, and will help to consolidate their understanding of your brand’s graphics.
Another good idea would be to use pictures of human beings, and specifically the faces of human beings. People are genetically predisposed to pay attention to human faces, so use images of people to your advantage as you grow your audiogram reach.
Add Transcriptions
Not everybody watches videos with the sound on. In fact, in modern times it’s more common for people to watch mobile videos with the sound off. Captions are an increasingly important feature with growing trends of “soundless” audio. People watch videos when there isn’t any audio to listen to, and they often do this because transcriptions are available, and they’re able to follow along by reading. Transcriptions of your audio content are necessary to capture the interest of the majority of people who use social media on their phones.
Select the Right Soundbite
You’ve created an entire podcast episode, so you should be able to know which moments you’re most proud of, and which exchanges you’ll most remember. Treat your audience much like yourself—is there an especially good bit of banter, or a key point of information that will leave people curious to delve in deeper?
Keep it short and sweet, too! There’s no use in giving away the entire podcast episode for free, as you want people to find and download the podcast on their app of choice. Picking the right clip from the podcast as a whole will help leave listeners wanting more.
Get Creative With Each Post!
Some posts will get more engagement than others. Especially when first sharing audiogram podcast posts, it’s worth it to mix up the style somewhat. Share different kinds of images or soundbites with different tones. If one audiogram performs better than another, you can respond to this feedback by attempting to imitate that style.
You should also pay attention to the performance of the audiogram across social media channels. Are people on Twitter responding to one that isn’t getting much attention on Instagram? If so, create content that’s tailored to the different social media sites, and you very well may see your response rate increase. One size does not necessarily fit all.
How to Make an Audiogram
At this point, you’re ready to become an audiogram creator!
There are several free-to-use applications that help you make audiograms very easily. An audiogram podcast post will lead to greater social media engagement, so if you want to get started creating raw content and building your brand, check out these steps below.
- Choose an Audio File – To build podcast audiograms, you will need to have a few podcast episodes handy to create audiograms with. Select the message and the section you want to illuminate your audience with.
- Design Your Audiogram – Select the dimensions of your audiogram depending on the chosen social media platform you will publish it on. Pick engaging static images or video assets that represent your message and select your waveform.
- Upload Your Audio Track – Certain audiogram platforms allow you to upload an existing file, or to record your audio content as you create audiograms!
- Add Audio Transcription – You can either type these out yourself, or use integrated subtitle generators to convert podcast content into captions. Many allow you to edit the captions’ font, style, and punctuation once it is uploaded.
- Download Your Videos – All you need to do is download your audiogram and prepare it to reach your online audience!
Final Thoughts
A fantastic way to establish and grow your brand identity and drive up social media engagement is to create awesome audiograms. A good audio clip will be sufficient to grasp your audience’s attention and drive traffic to your podcast episode!
However, not everyone was born tech-savvy, and building your brand in today’s world takes more than just engaging content. If you don’t have the free time to refine your podcast episodes and create audiograms, Invested Talent can help you repurpose and share your content to grow your brand and become a recognized thought leader. All we need is your raw content material, and we’ll take care of the rest!
When you create podcast audiograms, you’ll see your social media engagement rocket, and all of your hard work will be displayed to entirely new audiences via simple shareable videos! To repurpose your incredible content and maximize the reach of your social media accounts, get in touch with Invested Talent today.
