If you are hosting and putting out your own podcast, and like me find yourself scrambling for time to properly distribute it on social media here is an easy way to automate posting your podcast to social media.
All of the below was done utilizing completely free platforms and is working great for one of my podcast projects, The We Are Better Men podcast.
I tested several API’s, plugins and platforms and this combination seems to work the best, and with a pretty easy setup process.
What you will need:
Let’s start with your WordPress website. I highly recommend building a website to house your podcast content. Syndicating your podcast with Apple Itunes and Google Play is great. That will ensure you end up on Spotify and related platforms as well, but if you want to build an audience, collect data for retargeting purposes, and build a brand for your podcast I would definitely recommend hosting your podcast on a wordpress site. You will require one for this process to work, and it will need to be a self hosted wordpress instance (meaning you are not using a free wordpress.com blog). If you aren’t sure, or have any questions Contact Me and I’d be more than happy to assist.
Second, working our way back through the list above, you will need a free BUFFER account. Buffer is similar to products like Hootsuite that allow you to schedule and plan out social media content. While Hootsuite will work in this instance as well, I found Buffer to be easier to setup and it was refreshing to use something different as I spend a lot of time in Hootsuite managing social media content as it is.
Once you have setup your BUFFER account, you will want to connect it to all of the social media profiles you’d like to post your podcast on. You can trust BUFFER, its an industry standardized platform and I’ve never heard of any security breaches. It will ask you to sign in to your social media accounts.
Now that you have a wordpress site where you are posting your podcasts on regularly, and a buffer account connected to all of your social media platforms. The last step is automating the process of posting them on to social media.
That brings us to IFTTT. IFTTT is a free platform that basically connects things together. It’s actually extremely powerful once you get in there, but in this case we are using applets that connect wordpress to buffer.
Search for an applet titled “WordPress Post sends image and title to buffer”. Simpy follow the steps, select the profiles you want it to post on and you are done!
Anytime you add a podcast post to your WordPress website, it will automatically post it to your social media profiles with a link directly to the post. (Make sure you embed the podcast on your wordpress post!).