Today on five minute Monday, we'll talk about the easiest way to connect with your listeners on a consistent basis. Welcome to five minute Monday where we bring you the best tips and strategies for building your podcast all in five minutes or less. So if you're new here, consider subscribing.
Now podcasting is a fantastic way to share your passions and to find other people around the world that love what you love and in the process of creating a relationship with your audience, with your listeners, there may be time for you wonder what your audience thinks about your podcast, their likes and their dislikes, maybe some ideas they have for future topics and you want to have more of a dialogue , more of a two way relationship.
Well, there's an easy free way to connect and interact with your listeners on a consistent basis and that is simply to create a Facebook group dedicated to your podcast. Facebook groups are going to be much better than pages. Think about it like this. A Facebook group is a water cooler that everybody gums around to have conversations and to talk about what's going on in their lives versus pages.
A Facebook page would be more like a billboard where you're saying, this is my podcast, this is why it's awesome. You should listen. And so to have that two way interaction, you want that water cooler environment, which is what Facebook groups are fantastic for. So if you haven't created a Facebook group before, it's really simple. All you have to do if you're on your desktop and an internet browser is just click on the create button on the top toolbar on the top blue toolbar and choose group.
And from there you can go through all the instructions to set up your new Facebook group. If you don't use a desktop computer or a laptop or something similar and you just have the app on your phone, you can still create a Facebook group. So what you want to do when you open the app in your , on your home screen and you're looking at your newsfeed, you want to click on the hamburger. That's those three horizontal lines. In the bottom right corner of your screen.
From there you'll see a list of different things inside of Facebook, so you'll scroll down until you see groups and then click on groups. You'll see the groups that you've recently visited, some of your favorites. If you click the plus sign in the top right corner, you'll be able to create a new Facebook group.
Now, once you have your Facebook group all set up, you'll want to invite your listeners to join and there's a couple of ways that you can do that and you'll probably want to do all of these things.
Number one, you want to include a link to your Facebook group in your episode notes, so as people are listening to your podcast, if they want to interact with you, if they want to take the next step in their relationship with you so to speak, then they can very easily navigate to your Facebook group to join. You'll also want to make sure that you mentioned that you have the Facebook group somewhere in your episode.
It could be at the beginning of your podcast or in your outro sequence, but you want to make sure that you consistently talk about the fact that you have a Facebook group. So the people that listen to your podcast are aware of it. And you'll also want to invite anyone that you're friends with on Facebook that you know, listen to your podcasts to join.
So that way when people come in and start joining your Facebook group, they're not the first ones there and they won't feel weird or hesitant to interact with you. So once you have invited your listeners to join your Facebook group, it's in your podcast, it's in your episode notes. Here are a couple of conversations that you can start that will jumpstart your dialogue . Number one, you can put a poll in the group asking everyone to vote on their favorite episode of the last month.
This is a really easy way for people to interact with the posts that you have in your Facebook group and it tells you something as a podcast or that a lot of people really like this episode. So you should consider doing more like it.
Also create posts where you ask people and solicit their feedback of maybe who are some people that you should reach out to to interview for your podcast, who are the the people that they think would be a really good fit for what you do, and then also sharing podcasts , news and updates. If you have a really exciting interview coming up, the Facebook group is a great way to let your listeners know and get any initial feedback to guide that decision and make the best choice possible.
With Facebook groups, you can connect and interact with your listeners on a consistent basis. So create your Facebook group if you haven't already, and turn your podcast monologue into a conversation with your listeners. Need some extra help with your podcast, the bus sprout podcast community on Facebook is a great place to find answers and to get the help that you need to make your podcast as excellent as possible.
So if you're not a member yet, just click on the link in the show notes and ask to join. That's it for today. Thanks for listening and I'll talk to you soon.