Why Free Facebook Groups Aren’t Helping your Podcast Grow on Social Media
TL;DR Facebook groups are free, so they seem like a great place to promote your podcast. But there are 4 major downsides to theses groups.
❎ They aren’t your ideal audience
❎ They’re information overload
❎ They’re full of misinformation and boilerplate tips
❎ They have waaaay too much spam
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So you want to grow your podcast audience
Facebook groups are a starting place for many podcasters. They can be a great community for like minded people, a place to ask podcasting advice and a way to share your podcast with others. You might even join a free group with 50,000 people thinking that it’s a great way to get your podcast noticed. It may be a great place for advice on the best microphones or sound equipment but, the truth is, free facebook groups are not helping you grow your podcast. It all comes down to these 4 reasons.
It’s not your ideal audience
These free Facebook groups may have thousands of people, and you think, “Hey, they have a podcast too, they’ll definitely like my podcast.” it’s simply not true. Once you take out all the scammers, bots and people trying to sell you something, that easily gets rid of like half the people in the group. Then you have to account for the people who don’t even enjoy your genre of podcast. If you’re a science podcast, you can assume anyone who isn’t into science won’t listen. And the most important thing to remember is, most people aren’t in these groups to find new podcasts to listen to, they’re in the group to get their own podcasts noticed.
(warning, I do a bit of math below, but I promise it’s still worth reading 😉)
So while you may post about a new episode, you might get 100 people who like the post, and maybe 10 that actually listen. If there are 50,000 people in the group and only 10 people listen, that’s only 0.0002% of people you’re converting. Most experts will tell you that a 2-4% conversion rate is the standard on social media. So let’s say, for the sake of this example, you only have a 1% conversion rate. That means you will only need 1000 social media followers to get the same amount of listeners from those free facebook groups. And the likelihood is, that if someone follows you on social media, they’re more interested in your podcast. So if you do happen to have a 4% conversion rate, 1000 followers will get you 40 listeners that you can convert into regular listeners week after week.
Talk about information overload
Have you ever tried to use the search function on a Facebook group only to come up with posts that aren’t even relevant or are 5 years old? I have, it’s a nightmare. Not to mention these groups can sometimes have hundreds of posts each day asking some variation of the same question. It’s exhausting and can become overwhelming very quickly. You might think oh, I need to do X and Y and Z because I saw all these people say it works for them. The best path to take in getting your podcast noticed is really the one that works for you (seriously, if fb groups do happen to work for you, then feel free to ignore this advice). In my experience (which is managing dozens of different social media accounts and growing podcasts from 1000 to 60,000 followers) cutting out the noise and sticking with a strategy works far better than trying to sort through all the information in these groups.
Who actually wants shitty and basic advice?
This next point is really a follow up to my previous point, not only are these groups information overload, but a lot of the information being shared is garbage. Social media is not a one size fits all thing, and while there are many strategies that do work for everyone (like consistency, reels, good branding etc.) the details may not be the same for everyone. If a 7 second reel helps a “marketing guru” go viral, that doesn’t mean the same type of reel will work for you. Plus, oftentimes this advice is coming from someone who has successfully grown their account, but only just the one account, and they don’t have years of experience with different platforms, podcast genres, ideal audiences etc. So again, just because something worked for them, doesn’t mean it's going to work for you.
In my experience, the advice you find in these groups is boilerplate at best. They offer no specifics into your needs, and more often than not are only ‘hacks’ for short term growth, not long term growth or conversion.
The spam and bots are out of control
If you are in many of these free groups, you already know exactly what I’m going to say here. The bots, scams, and creeps are out in full force in these groups. If you post about a new podcast you’re starting, I guarantee you’ll get posts, comments and messages like:
I found all of these comments in less than 1 minute, and they took up 90% of the comments, there were only a few that seemed genuine.
So ask yourself, just because it’s free, does that mean it’s worth your time?
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