People Aren’t Searching for Podcasts Anymore—They’re Stumbling Into Them
The use of social media to find new listeners to your podcast used to not be the number one goal, and it still is. So, why use social media in the first place, and how do you use it effectively for your podcast?
I’ve worked in the social media market for over 15 years. By the time I graduated from college, all of my cohorts and I were the guinea pigs and given the task of figuring out just how to hell to use social media for the companies that we started working for.
And times have changed, video wasn’t as popular. An image truly was worth 1000 words, and that image on Instagram tended to be the meal that you were eating. Does anyone remember this meme?
By 2015, I started working with podcasts that needed help using social media to promote their podcast to their existing listeners.
When it came to podcasting, you rarely found new listeners to your podcast through social media. But in the last couple of years, as video kept growing in demand as a form of content and podcasting grew as video podcasting, the two collided.
Specifically, the short clips that would be found on YouTube Shorts. At the 2026 On Air Fest, I attended a talk with the Queen Bees of podcasting and social media, Arielle Nissenblatt🎧 and Lauren Passell.
They had conducted a rather unique form of study to see how people find podcasts and how they view podcasts. These were everyday people from New York City on a cold winter day. These were not professional podcasters or nerds like we were.
One of the surprising things that we learned from their video and from their time talking to random people who wanted to talk to them from ages 18 to maybe 50 was that, particularly the young audience, was finding new podcasts that they were interested in listening to, or rather watching, because they found clips on social media, specifically YouTube if not on other places like TikTok or Instagram. They were intrigued and wanted to listen to the whole episode, which eventually led them to subscribe and listen to more.
This was not usually the case, even two years ago. Previously, podcasts had social media to promote their podcasts for their existing audience and in a later post, I will share one of the top ways to find more podcast listeners. It was not through social media, so this revelation that social media clips were actually helping raise awareness to an existing podcast and finding new listeners was encouraging and helpful to learn that all those times that I spent editing for clients and for Safe Passages were really helping.
For Safe Passages, since I host the podcast on Substack, the data is not that great for podcasting, but I also put the episode, plus all the clips on YouTube.
YouTube shows how many views and how long people have stayed on, and it tends to be a lot more than the actual episode. I find this encouraging, not just for me, but for my guests who are there to promote their own Substack for their own products and services, or just trying to help others by giving good advice and tips.
So social media is useful for your podcast, specifically using smart short clips usually around 60 seconds that give not just a preview of what the whole conversation is, but are also really useful if seen just by themselves.
Have you used social media for your podcast? Clips? Share your experience!