Podcast hosts get 10x the engagement via text than on social.

Create an exclusive community for your loyal podcast listeners via Subtext. Here’s how to tell them all about it.

Not only is Subtext the place for your subscribers to confirm that your podcast is distracting their kids from school, our hosts, like Doug Lesmerises of Buckeye Talk, are finding their fans are much more likely to engage via Subtext then via social channels, where they have much larger followings.

Subtext sees 10x the engagement of fans on its platform vs. social channels. Why? Because texting offers your fans a direct, private, troll-free channel to have conversations with you and your team. For hosts with an established podcast audience, frequent mention of the exclusive Subtext community makes for solid engagement and a new revenue stream.

Here’s how hosts like Buckeye Talk’s Doug Lesmerises cross promote their text community via their podcast. They do 4 things repeatedly in every podcast to encourage listeners to join their Subtext communities:

1. They give an overview of the benefits of joining their text community. I.e. private virtual events, access to vote in their polls, exclusive content. Providing an example of the content of a text helps as well.
2. They provide the phone number (which is repeated a couple of times) so subscribers can immediately text to get started.
3. They let subscribers know about the cost and more importantly about the 14-day free trial. Note: about 2/3 of subscribers stay on after the free trial.
4. They mention the Subtext community about 3x per episode. This would depend on the length of your pod.

Take a listen below to how Doug weaves in the promotion of Subtext. Here’s the context of this clip: Buckeye Talk is now a daily podcast from Cleveland.com. They consistently rely on their Subtext community for user feedback on topics to discuss on the show, regularly answer subscriber questions and are more recently taking polls that are then shared on the podcast.

Much like Buckeye Talk, Cleveland Football Insider also has a podcast, Orange and Brown Talk, where they too promote their Subtext community at the beginning, middle and end of the podcast. Take a listen:

On the Subtext side, hosts are regularly reaching out to the community and vice versa to discuss what’s on the podcast. In the example pictured, Buckeye Talk’s Doug Lesmerises does a call out for questions for their next podcast. 10% of the Subtext community responds. Some of the highest engagement they see from their Subtext community is around callouts for their poadcast. This level of engagement is about 10x what Doug was previously seeing on Twitter, as we mentioned earlier.

Now, check out how other Subtext/podcast hosts are getting 60% of their subscribers to reply to their calls to action.

So you’ve got a podcast and you’re ready to make it more interactive as well as discover new ways to fund it? Hit us up with your questions: hello@joinsubtext.com.