You’ve likely written a social media post like this before:

New episode out today! Click the link below to listen to the latest episode of my podcast.

This is how most people promote their podcasts on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. Then they look at their download metrics and wonder why their podcast isn’t growing.

And while this type of post may perform okay as a reminder for your regular listeners - people who were likely going to listen anyway - it isn’t going to get you any new listeners. So your download numbers remain flat.

To understand why, you have to think about the psychology of a person when they’re scrolling through their feed.

In today’s world, we’re constantly bombarded by people promoting their products, services and content. And as good as the algorithms are getting, much of this content doesn’t apply to us, so we’ve gotten pretty good ourselves at blocking it out.

The stuff that gets through our filter is the stuff that resonates. And a stranger telling you to listen to their new podcast episode definitely doesn’t resonate.

So, what should you do instead?

Let’s take an example from another industry where people know exactly how to promote their content: Hollywood movies.

Imagine if a movie preview was just a random stranger in a video on your feed asking you to spend the next 2 hours of your life watching their new movie.

It’s pretty unlikely that you’d watch the movie, right?

Instead, movie previews tell a story. More accurately, they take pieces of a longer story and cut them up into a shorter story in such a way that makes you want to know the full story.

This is the same strategy we can use to effectively promote our podcast episodes.

Here’s the first post of a thread I posted (on Threads) telling the story of how the fantasy fangirls podcast quickly grew into a top fantasy romance podcast. It’s not until a few posts into the thread that I provide the link to the episode.

You may think it’s better to share the link directly in that first post, where the highest number of people are going to see it. But at that point it doesn’t matter how many people see the link, because you haven’t given anyone a good enough reason to click it..

That’s why I wait to share the link until after I’ve told an engaging story and left the reader wanting more.

And even though I had a very small audience on Threads at the time, this post alone drove dozens of new listeners to my podcast.

It may take you some time to learn how to write compelling stories about your podcast content, but I promise it will work better than the strategy most podcasters are using. Go ahead and try it out with your next episode and let me know how it goes.