Promote Your LiveStream – Tips and Tricks

Livestream content has become an engaging form of media. Podbean now gives you the opportunity to livestream your podcast and engage your audience in new and exciting ways. What steps can you take to drive listener attendance and engagement to and with your livestream?  We’ve put together a list of best practices to promote your livestream:

1. Utilize eye catching promotional images for social media
2. Promote your livestream during you regularly scheduled episodes
3. Use your email list and newsletters to promote your livestream
4. Cross promote your podcast on similar podcasts
5. Utilize audiograms
6. Sponsors and advertisers (paid and unpaid)
7. Develop a community around your podcast
8. Find new outlets for your podcast to be discovered

–

1. Utilize eye catching promotional images for social media

Podbean always recommends posting your new episodes, news and show schedule via your social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr.  Eye catching images do a great job at drawing attention in the world of fast mobile app swiping. By creating a graphic for your upcoming livestream schedule (whether it’s pinned to the top of your profile, or your chosen social media’s header image) you’re drawing a potential listener’s eye directly to your most important information.

If you’re familiar with our Podbean 101 webinar, we discuss that you can use any digital art programs such as GNU Image Manipulation Program (free), Adobe Photoshop, Pixelmator and others to create your images. 

2. Promote your livestream during your regularly scheduled episodes

Each of your podcast listeners is also another potential livestream listener.  By making a point of bringing up your livestream during your episodes, you give your listeners more access to engage with you. It also exists as a permanent fixture of the episode, so no matter who listens to it they get access to the information, from your longest running listeners to your newest listener. 

If you utilize dynamic ad insertion such as PodAds, record a few bumpers to insert into your back episodes that feature information about your livestreams.  By using ad insertion, you can easily change your ads to keep your livestream info up to date. You can also set reminders and links into your show descriptions on each episode for even easirt access for your listeners.

3. Use your email list and newsletters to promote your livestream

Your newsletters and email lists put you directly into your dedicated listeners’ inboxes. Along with informing your followers about convention appearances, future episode topics, and podcast-related news, you can deliver information about your upcoming podcast livestreams.  

You can also utilize your patron program (Podbean has built in seamless way for fans to support you directly from your podcast), you can also make patron-only perks for your livestreams.  You can have your patrons weigh in on topics you discuss, answer call-ins from patrons only, or set up a variety of livestream-based rewards. 

4. Cross promote your livestream on similar podcasts

Many podcasters cross collaborate on extra-special episodes and/or guest-host episodes on each other’s podcasts.  By featuring these guests, you’re allowing yourself to market to an audience that’s interested in your guest, but may not be familiar with you or your show. The vice-versa may also open your podcast up to a brand new set of ears. Many podcasts within a similar genre also benefit from cross promoting ads on each other’s shows.  

You can also use a tool like Podbean’s Ads Marketplace (as an advertiser) to create ads promoting your livestream to run on other podcasts.  By advertising on podcasts with content similar to yours, you can reach out to a wider scope of listeners.  Ads marketplace allows you to review the statistics and activity of various podcasts such as downloads per month, geographic listenership, and more.  

5. Utilize Audiograms

Audiograms are video clips of audio that play over a video or still background image.  These short clips can be perfect for posting strong, poignant episode points to social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook.  There are also options to include transcripts of these clips or to just have audio only. By deploying a different format to your posts for your social media platforms, you diversify your feed for your followers and create a visual contrast that’s more likely to encourage your followers to check out the rest of your posts.

Don’t be afraid to get creative with how audiograms integrate your livestream into your social media posts.  Create goals for listeners to call in with their best story or wildest joke, and the best one gets turned into an audiogram for social media. Your livestream is an event for people to plan for, but the highly-coveted (or soon-to-be highly-coveted) spot of having the best call can be a goal they can shoot for.  (We’ve been using Headliner with fantastic results!)

6. Sponsors and advertisers: paid or unpaid

There are many ways to benefit from sponsorships. As well as financial sponsorships, sponsors can offer promotional opportunities such as featuring you on their site, providing your access to events you might not have otherwise been able to attend, and discounts on products (such as gear you use and promote during your podcast). Promotional sponsorships allow you to reach a much wider audience, and allow fans of your sponsor to find you as well.  

7. Develop a community around your podcast

Community is one of the most important parts of growing a podcast listenership.  By creating a place for your listeners to congregate, you’ve now given them a place to discuss your topics related to and/or covered on your podcasts/livestream.

As examples, you can use a Facebook group or a server on the chat platform Discord to build engagement and post news about livestreams, upcoming podcast events, and other items to keep your community informed.  Much like with your patrons mentioned above, you can allow your community to weigh in on future topics, certain segments of your livestream, or primary priority for calling in on your podcast livestream.

8. Find new outlets for your podcast to be discovered

When we spoke with Gabriel Urbina, he discovered that quite a bit of the conversation for his podcast Wolf 359 was happening on Tumblr, a platform that he hadn’t been present on beforehand.  You never know where your podcast will find its audience, but by reaching out on different platforms you will be able to reach out to listeners who might not navigate your other platforms, and increase podcast livestream attendees.  

There are import/export systems in place to have your episodes cross-posted to places like Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, WordPress, and Tumblr.  Explore the different platforms and formats of your show (with sites like Youtube and Facebook, your episode posts as a video), and expand invitations to your podcast livestreams to each platform.
–
When it comes to promoting your podcast and your podcast livestreams, there are many different paths to investigate and travel down.  By using one (or more) of these methods, you increase your visibility, and increase the pool of livestream attendees.  

Podbean Live is available to any podcaster on any hosting company. Click here to start your livestream today!