In this episode of Podtastic Audio, I reflect on the early days of podcast promotion with my first podcast, "The Kris and Kristine Show," back in mid-2020. We utilized Twitter resharing groups as a marketing tool, where podcasters would share new episodes within the group, and members were expected to reshare each other's content. However, recent observations revealed a shift in behavior. Many podcasters began using these groups solely as personal billboards, neglecting the reciprocity that once defined them. Disheartened by this trend, I've made the difficult decision to close down all Twitter groups associated with both podcasts, marking the end of an era in our promotional strategies. Join me as I discuss the evolution of podcast promotion and explore new avenues for audience engagement and growth.
Thanks so much for listening, I really appreciate it so much. If you need any help with your podcast, feel free to reach out. My email is podtasticaudio@gmail.com
[00:00:00] In the early days of our podcast, we got involved with a social media marketing strategy for free to help grow our show.
[00:00:09] But things don't always end up as they're supposed to. So last week I made the decision to shut it all down.
[00:00:23] Sound Matters. Be Heard.
[00:00:26] Welcome to the podcast where you get exclusive behind the scenes tips to make your own show sound truly spectacular. This is Podtastic Audio.
[00:00:38] Hey, what's happening? How are you doing today? Thank you. I mean, truly do mean that. Thank you so much for being here.
[00:00:47] I am Chris and I'm from the Chris and Christine show podcast. You know, Christine and I started that show way back in the summer of 2019 using my old dinosaur computer plugging in basic generic very cheap microphones into it, creating a show entirely for fun for close to free as I possibly could make it.
[00:01:11] But more importantly, it was totally for fun. We were doing it having a blast in the early days of podcasting, getting it going and people seem to like it. They liked it so much that I was getting questions like hey, how did you do that?
[00:01:27] Like how does your show sound so great? How is the guest that you bring on? How are they standing so great?
[00:01:34] Well, because of those questions, I decided to start a new show. This one, Podtastic Audio, which is entirely designed to help you create your amazing podcast. That is the only reason this show even exists. It's just to help you out.
[00:01:50] So let's make an amazing podcast. So if we look back at the year 2020, it's probably a year that most of us would rather just forget because that was the year a lot of things started.
[00:02:04] One thing for sure was that it started all of these COVID lockdown quarantine rules. I think it was, it was February. It wasn't March. It might have been March 2020 when they came down at least here in California with an absolute lockdown.
[00:02:22] Everybody was supposed to be in quarantine unless you were an essential worker like I was. So lockdowns for me meant pretty much nothing, but for most of the people out there, they were stuck at home doing what you possibly can figure out what to do.
[00:02:39] Now, if you are going to school, they did online schooling. All the schools went to virtual schooling and the same thing happened to a lot, if not all of the office jobs. They were all working from home. I mean, all you really needed was a computer and an internet connection and you were good to go.
[00:02:58] And because so many people were at home and so many people had so much time available to them, they got bored and they thought this would be a great idea to start a podcast.
[00:03:11] And we saw a massive and I mean a super huge massive surge of podcasts flood the market. And this was probably around the same time that I was trying to really, let's just say up our game with the social media for the Chris and Christine show had locked in our Instagram page.
[00:03:34] I think Christine was trying to take care of the Facebook page linking it to her Facebook account or something like that. I'm not a big Facebook user, but I think that's what she was doing. And then of course the Twitter account, I got that locked into right around the same time.
[00:03:49] And I noticed that a lot of other like brand new podcasters were coming to the scene and we were all kind of following each other and kind of talking to each other. And a lot of us, like I was also following newer shows like ours and kind of seeing what they were doing and maybe kind of like feeding off each other.
[00:04:09] Oh, you do things with this service. Great. Let me check that out. Or maybe you're using this kind of microphone. Let me check that out. So it was a lot of like kind of interaction social wise on Twitter at the time, which kind of increased our following quite rapidly.
[00:04:26] I remember somewhere mid 2020 is when we, I think we were probably somewhere just over a thousand followers on Twitter at the time, which I thought was pretty good because my personal Twitter account, which I had, I think since the history of Twitter only had maybe 100 or 150 followers total.
[00:04:50] So to get over a thousand, I was like, wow, that's quite impressive. So like I said, I was making friends with other podcasters on the Twitter social media platform, which made it very, very easy. It seems like there were so many podcasters that use Twitter at the time.
[00:05:08] And I kind of recommended Twitter at the time to be the one place that if you were going to be a podcaster, put your stuff there because it made things very easy to share and be reshared.
[00:05:20] And you can put video and audio and even links to things in each and every single post. And now that it's called X, I still believe you can still do some of the same things.
[00:05:29] I do everybody has their opinions of what X is or whether they use X or don't use X, but it's still a great place to put stuff on as a content creator.
[00:05:41] So around mid 2020 or so, I was following another podcast and they were like a smaller podcast, like just started maybe a few months ago at that point.
[00:05:52] And I noticed that they would post out their brand new episode, new episode, episode three, episode five out. Here's the link to it. Check it out. Whatever.
[00:06:01] Like we all usually do. But then one thing I did notice was that they were getting a lot of retweets because you can see the retweet number on each and every post.
[00:06:11] You can see how many likes it got and how many retweets it got for every post.
[00:06:14] And I noticed on theirs, it was getting like a lot more than we got maybe 10, 20 times more retweets than our posts were getting.
[00:06:25] And we had over a thousand followers at that time and that other podcaster barely had 200, maybe 300 at the most followers.
[00:06:34] Something. How are they getting so many more retweets than we were? So I just asked him, I send over a DM and I said, Hey, how is it possible that you're getting so many retweets for your posts?
[00:06:49] What are you doing? And he said, Oh, I'm in a few of these Twitter groups.
[00:06:55] And I said, what's a Twitter group? So he says it's like a group text thread on Twitter.
[00:07:03] It's a group where everybody in the group shares their content and their stuff and everybody re shares everybody else's stuff.
[00:07:11] It's a tit for tat as you were here. Let me invite you into one of my chats because you have to be invited in by somebody who was already in the group.
[00:07:20] That's how it works. And I was like, yeah, I would love to do that because we were trying to get our show out to the masses, which is the goal of any content creator to get your content out to as many people as possible.
[00:07:33] So I was like, wow, that sounds like a really crazy, great idea because now I can put my show into this Twitter group thread chat thing and everybody in the group is going to re share it out to all of their followers.
[00:07:48] And it kind of does this branching out effect, which in theory on paper sounds amazing. So I said, great, let's do this.
[00:07:58] So he added our show, the Chris Garcia show. He added our Twitter account into these big group text chats, which were, I think there was about three of them he added us into at the time.
[00:08:12] I mean, you can probably have a bunch of them, but I did notice a lot of the same people were in multiple group chats. He was now we were okay, great. Let's play along.
[00:08:23] So basically what it was is that if you had a brand new episode that you created a post for, you would take that Twitter post and you would put it into the group chat and everybody in the group chat would like it and retweet it.
[00:08:38] It was very simple. It's like literally two clicks on your thumb, like click one to like and the other one to reshare done.
[00:08:46] And those first early days that we are in these group text chats was that I did notice there was being flooded with like 50 to 100 notifications, maybe even more in like one day.
[00:08:58] And I was trying my best to go through there. And I think I did a fairly good job of being responsive and being on top of every single post that was put in there.
[00:09:09] People would write in their brand new episode out, please like and reshare. And you believe me, I was on it. I was constantly liking and resharing, like and resharing.
[00:09:18] And I did notice that even our posts were getting 10 times, even 20 times, maybe even more than that likes and reshares than we ever saw before on our own.
[00:09:31] It was incredible. It was great time. Now remember this is right in the heart of 2020 and right in the middle of the pandemic when everybody was doing a podcast.
[00:09:41] So there were so many people in these groups. I mean, I've been talking like maybe a hundred or 200 different podcasts or maybe even YouTubers also, but most of them are just podcasts that were in here and they were all posting their brand new episodes.
[00:09:59] Please like and reshare. Please like and reshare. And I was on top of it because it's not that hard to do all you have to do.
[00:10:05] Like I said, it's just two button clicks one to like one to reshare. And that's it and you're done. You move on.
[00:10:13] And I kept going with this for quite a while, a lot longer than I should. I'll get into that in a little bit, but later that year, well actually closer to 2021 is when podcastic audio officially launched.
[00:10:27] And you believe me because I was already in those groups with the Chris Christine show, I added myself into those groups with potastic audio.
[00:10:36] So when potastic audio launched, I followed suit. I did the exact same thing for both channels.
[00:10:43] I've got myself liking and resharing stuff for Chris Christine.
[00:10:47] I got myself liking and resharing stuff for potastic audio in all of the groups I was in.
[00:10:53] In fact, I actually started another group all by myself for potastic audio.
[00:11:00] I just called it like new episodes. If you want to release a new episode or share a new episode, put it in this group chat.
[00:11:07] And I had quite a few people in that group chat also now other podcasters that I've seen have also created their own group chats to do the same thing because in theory, like I said on paper,
[00:11:19] the way it seems to work is that the more people that are in these group chats that are physically sharing new episodes will also like and reshare your episodes.
[00:11:31] So you see if it from a numbers game, a marketing game, the more numbers that you can put out there, the more people you get out there to share your message, the better.
[00:11:41] And it all sounds amazing. It sounds wonderful. But then as 2021 turned into 2022 and then 2023, but somewhere around 2022, you did start to notice a lot of these podcasts that started in 2020 start to fade out.
[00:12:02] They did not make it to 2022. And so they were dropping out of these Twitter groups or they just weren't sharing anything at all because I did notice that I would put an episode into these Twitter groups.
[00:12:17] And back in 2020, we were seeing a lot of interaction. We're seeing a lot of retweets.
[00:12:22] Those numbers start dwindling and dwindling and people would come and go mostly go, but those numbers started falling less and less.
[00:12:32] Now, hey, I get it. A lot of these shows pod faded by the time 2022 came around or they just stopped doing it because you got to remember when you're locked up at home and you're totally bored and all your friends are also locked up in your totally bored.
[00:12:47] Yeah. You can totally fire up the old zoom chat bot machine and you can do a podcast virtually about anything you want to talk about your favorite Marvel movies or whatever it is.
[00:12:58] It's very easy to do that when you're all on zoom doing it together. Somebody does the editing and somebody puts it out on social media and does the sharing, retweeting, all that great stuff.
[00:13:07] But what happens is that if you have a show with multiple people and then a few of those people decide to go back to work or whatever reasons or they have kids or they move or who knows what things happen.
[00:13:21] Life gets in the way and that fun movie hobby podcast that you were doing during 2020 because you had nothing else going on.
[00:13:29] Well, that becomes the thing that is just something you just don't do anymore. It pod fades.
[00:13:37] Now, if you've made it over 100 episodes, congratulations. If you made it over a couple of years of podcasting, congratulations. Hey, I get it.
[00:13:46] Podcasting is not incredibly easy. It may seem easy. It might have been easy in 2020 when we're all free, but we're not free anymore.
[00:13:53] We don't have time to do this every single day, all day long. We got jobs and responsibilities.
[00:14:00] Okay. So going back to those Twitter retweeting groups. I was on there not that long ago.
[00:14:07] And like I said, I've noticed that the retweets and the likes have been twiddling down to almost nothing like pretty much close to nothing.
[00:14:16] I put something in the Twitter group. There were some people that would engage with it and they would like it and reshare and things of that sort.
[00:14:24] Yeah, but it was not as popular as it was in those early days when we first got involved with those Twitter groups.
[00:14:32] So one day I'm on there and I'm just trying to reshare and be on top of everybody's stuff.
[00:14:38] And it got me thinking because we were not getting a lot of reshares on our stuff, so much that it would be very easily you can look at who reshared it,
[00:14:47] especially if we put it into the group. You can see who actually reshared it and you can see who actually did not reshare it.
[00:14:54] So it got me thinking. So what I'm in the group one day, I'm looking at all these different posts from all these different shows.
[00:15:00] And there was a couple that actually caught my eye, like two or three that caught my eye.
[00:15:05] And I noticed they were constantly asking for us to like and reshare their posts for their episodes or whatever they're doing.
[00:15:13] And I did it without question because that's what I thought you were supposed to do.
[00:15:18] If you post in there, you're supposed to repost for other people. That's kind of how it all works.
[00:15:23] So as I'm looking at their stuff and I'm reposting their stuff and I'm like, let me dig in a little deeper because I don't remember them being one of the ones that reshared our stuff.
[00:15:37] Because like I said, the numbers have dropped down quite a bit so much you kind of remember which shows actually retweeted your own stuff like they were supposed to.
[00:15:47] And so I was like, let me check into that one a little deeper.
[00:15:52] So I look into that show that was constantly flooding the feed with, hey, share our stuff. Hey, share our posts. Hey, like and reshare our stuff. Please. Thank you.
[00:16:02] So I looked at their posts. I looked at their Twitter feed and I went down their feed and I could not find a single retweet of any kind from any other show other than their own show.
[00:16:17] Basically meaning that they were dumping in to these Twitter groups. Hey, please reshare our stuff. Please reshare our stuff.
[00:16:27] But they were not resharing anybody else's stuff, including ours.
[00:16:32] So immediately I got frustrated and pissed off. I was like, how dare you?
[00:16:38] I've been retweeting your garbage for three, four years now and you stopped or haven't even considered resharing our stuff.
[00:16:50] So within these little groups, you can write messages that everybody in the group sees not just posting stuff, but you can actually write text in the group.
[00:16:58] And I would occasionally write things like, hey, just a friendly reminder.
[00:17:01] If you post things in here asking for retweets, you need to do the same for others and retweet their stuff.
[00:17:09] And that is how the whole entire concept of these retweeting groups even work.
[00:17:16] But it wasn't even just one show that did this. It was multiple shows that did the same thing.
[00:17:23] They would constantly post and a lot of times the posts they would put in there, it wasn't about a new episode.
[00:17:29] It was some random nonsense like, I'm watching this movie right now.
[00:17:34] Good. Who cares? Is that something you need me to reshare for you?
[00:17:39] Why can't you share that for yourself? And why are you posting that into a retweet group?
[00:17:44] This was designed for people, for content creators to put their brand new episode in, get their episode out to the masses.
[00:17:53] That is what these things are for, not for you to share stupid nonsense.
[00:17:57] Oh, and on a quick side note about this whole thing.
[00:18:01] There was not a single show in these Twitter groups that I actually listened to or subscribed to at all.
[00:18:09] So here I am reposting, resharing all of their stuff.
[00:18:14] And yet I never like listened to any of their shows like at all.
[00:18:18] If I'm being honest, I never listened to any of these shows, although I was resharing it.
[00:18:22] It makes me wonder how many other shows did the exact same thing where they were resharing our stuff yet never listened to our stuff.
[00:18:32] It makes you wonder about that kind of thing.
[00:18:34] So a lot of these podcasters, the ones that were just constantly filling the feed but not participating on anything really pissed me off.
[00:18:43] So I was keeping a mental note of those three podcasts that were doing that.
[00:18:48] And I was like, you know what?
[00:18:50] And when they share things in the Twitter group, I will make sure to never ever share their stuff at all.
[00:18:57] They are completely dead to me because they have literally made use of these Twitter retweeting groups as their own personal fan base.
[00:19:06] That's what they think it is.
[00:19:08] They think it's a personal billboard for their own stuff.
[00:19:10] They think that we are their fans and yet, like I said, I didn't listen to anybody's stuff that was in there.
[00:19:15] I just used it as a marketing tool to reshare our content.
[00:19:21] So after about almost four years of using these Twitter retweeting groups, oh my God, that sounds like such a long time.
[00:19:29] Four years already?
[00:19:31] Oh my goodness.
[00:19:33] I decided to shut it down for both the Chris and Christine show and podcastic audio.
[00:19:39] I shut them both down.
[00:19:40] I killed the group.
[00:19:42] I had, I know somebody else killed their group too.
[00:19:45] And then I started getting messages saying like, Hey, what happened?
[00:19:50] You guys were in the group.
[00:19:52] You guys left. What happened?
[00:19:54] Well, I appreciate your concerns, but like I said, it just started becoming flooded with people just posting their crap and not actually resharing anybody else's stuff.
[00:20:05] And that's just not cool.
[00:20:06] So if you're a content creator, podcast or YouTuber, something of that sort, and you are using Twitter X right now and you want to get your message out to the masses instead of using a Twitter post group that you're going to put your stuff in.
[00:20:23] And everybody is supposed to reshare it, but they usually won't.
[00:20:26] So you think that maybe these people in this group here will see my post because it's in this group thread and they will check it out or listen to my show or whatever.
[00:20:37] That doesn't always happen because we are dealing with actual people.
[00:20:42] People are not machines.
[00:20:44] People have free will and they have their own opinions, likes and dislikes.
[00:20:49] Not everybody is going to like your show and that is okay.
[00:20:52] Not everybody is going to like the things that you do or even like you in general.
[00:20:58] And that is okay.
[00:21:00] What you really want to do is find your true audience and get your show in front of them.
[00:21:06] And that was the mistake that we made early on in the Chris Christine show thinking that our show was for everybody.
[00:21:14] So let's get it out in front of as many people as possible.
[00:21:18] It's not about numbers.
[00:21:20] It's about the right numbers because somebody can press play on your podcast right now just to check it out.
[00:21:27] But if it doesn't resonate with them, if they are bored, if it's something that they're not interested in, they're not going to press play twice.
[00:21:35] So if you are on social media, what you really need to do is actually participate in the community and not just promote.
[00:21:45] So if you have been one of those shows that have constantly just constantly been posting, posting, posting new episode, new episode, check it out, new episode, reshare it, new episode, like it and reshare it please.
[00:21:58] If you're one of those shows, here's a new strategy.
[00:22:01] Try posting more content that actually gets engagement within the community.
[00:22:08] It's all about engagement on social media.
[00:22:10] The more likes and comments and reshares that are done organically, the algorithm for the social media platform, whether it's Twitter or Instagram or whatever it is, will push it out to more people.
[00:22:26] In fact, I noticed that trend myself because there were certain posts that I would create that were very engaging that stirred the community.
[00:22:34] Those posts would go much further all by themselves without the help of me putting into one of those quote unquote chat group things.
[00:22:45] It would go on its own organically and I would go much, much further than those Twitter group things were pushing an episode if I put it exclusively in there.
[00:22:55] So if you create posts that actually drive engagement, get curiosity, get people talking about your posts and not just that also do the same for others.
[00:23:07] Hey, the bottom line is participate on social media more than you promote, which for us podcasters out there can be a little harder to do because we're constantly promoting and talking about our show, especially right into the microphone.
[00:23:22] We're projecting this information. We're projecting our show to you, the listener. And it's difficult to be the one to step back and actually be on the other side and actually be a listener and a participant of other people's content.
[00:23:39] And I know you can do it. You are participating with your ears right now. Thank you so much for listening all the way to the very end of this episode.
[00:23:48] And if you want to reach out to me on X Twitter by handle, there is podcasting a there is a link to it in the show notes of this very episode.
[00:23:58] You scroll on down and there it is. And until next time, happy podcasting.