In the last episode, 162, I shared what my maternity leave was like, and one of the things that I talked about in that episode was not being on social media and not sending my usual weekly emails for four months.
I know a lot of you have thought about taking a break from social or email platforms (or leaving them altogether) and wonder what kind of effect that could have on your podcast downloads. Obviously, your experience is going to be different than mine, but in this episode, I'm sharing what kind of effect my break had on my podcast downloads with no socials or emails.
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Transcripts
Sara Whittaker 0:01
Sara, your podcast is a powerful tool that serves your audience and your business, but how do you manage it all bring in new listeners and convert those listeners into customers. That's what the show is all about. Welcome to podcasting for educators. I'm Sara Whittaker, classroom teacher turned podcast manager, and I'm here to help you get the most out of your show, all while making an impact on other educators. Hey there, and welcome back to podcasting for educators, where I help you create a podcast that educates your audience and serves your business. Last week, in episode 162 I shared about what my maternity leave was like, and one of the things that I talked about in that episode was how I ended up not being on social media and not sending my usual weekly emails for the duration of the time that I was on leave, which ended up being about four months. It was April through July. And if you've heard in previous episodes, if you've heard me talking about my plan for maternity leave. My original plan wasn't necessarily to just not be on social media and not send emails. My plan was to kind of, instead of batching those things ahead of time, I was going to just do them as I could during my maternity leave. I was not necessarily stressed about being super consistent with those things. I told myself, if I could get to sending an email, great. If I could get to posting on Instagram, great. But I knew that I wasn't necessarily going to be super consistent with it. The whole time during my leave, I was still putting out weekly podcast episodes during my maternity leave, which I had batched way ahead of time. So all was good there, but if you heard in my last episode, I ended up having my daughter a few weeks early. She had a NICU stay, and it was just kind of a bumpy road there for a while, not what I was anticipating for my maternity leave. And so it just ended up that I did not send emails, and I was not on social media for about four months. So I thought that I would record a quick episode for you and just let you know, like, what kind of effect that had on my podcast downloads. Because I know that a lot of you have thought about, you know, taking a break from some of these platforms or exiting them entirely. And you might wonder, what kind of effects will that have on my podcast downloads? And I know a lot of you also wonder, I'm sending out an email every week, or I'm posting on social media every week about my podcast. Is it even impacting my downloads or not, it can be hard to know where your podcast traffic is coming from. And for many of you who have a love hate and sometimes more of just a hate relationship with social media, you might wonder like, Could I just not do this and keep up my podcast downloads. So obviously your experience is going to be different than mine, but I'll just kind of share what kind of effect this absence from emailing and from social media had on my podcast downloads. So like I said, the first month that I kind of stopped showing up on these platforms was in April, and that ended up being my lowest month of the year, of the calendar year so far for my podcast download. So I did see a really big dip then in May, again, continuing not to send emails, not to be on social media. That ended up being my second highest download month of the calendar year. June ended up being my third highest month of the year, and then July ended up being my fourth highest month of the year. So to kind of backtrack there, I saw a dip in April, an increase in May, and then from May to June, a slight decrease, and then another slight decrease from June to July. However, looking at May, June, July, overall, they were all very similar in downloads. It wasn't like a huge dip from my normal monthly downloads before taking that break, but also not a huge increase either. I will actually include a snapshot of my download graph, because I host my podcast on Captivate, and they have a bar graph that shows you your monthly downloads. So I'll put that in the show notes, so that you can kind of get a visual of this, and you can kind of see that fluctuation with my downloads. But like I said, even though there was kind of this, like, up and down and up and down kind of thing going on during these months, it wasn't massive compared to. What my normal downloads are. So I definitely, overall don't feel like my absence of being on Instagram or of not being on Instagram and not sending emails really have like a huge impact on my podcast downloads. However, something else that I peeked at was I went into my apple podcast account, and in Apple podcast Connect, you can see how many new followers you gain on Apple podcast each month and how many followers you lose on Apple podcast each month. And there was during these months, from April to July, there was a clear decrease in the number of new followers that I was getting on Apple podcasts compared to other months when I am typically sharing about episodes on email and on socials. So I thought that that was really interesting, and that makes complete sense to me, right? I mean, the point of sharing about your podcast on social media and sharing about your podcast to your email list is to Yes, a remind your current audience that you have a podcast and hey, don't forget to go listen to this episode for people who may already subscribe or follow your show. But it's also to hopefully attract some new listeners and bring in some new followers to your podcast. And so it makes complete sense to me that during these months that I wasn't sharing about my show and about my episodes, I'm not going to have a bunch of new followers, because where are they coming from? I did have some new followers, and I would probably attribute that to people sharing my show SEO, people finding it through Google and also finding it through the podcast listening apps, but definitely a decrease in new followers when I wasn't sharing on on these other platforms. So that was very telling for sure. So kind of my overall thoughts here is that if you need to cut back on social media, or you need to cut back on email for a certain period of time, because that's just what you need to do for whatever reason, whether it's maternity leave, or you get sick, or you are caring for somebody in your family who's sick, or you just need a break, like you're just burnt out, and you need to cut back on some things. I don't think that it is going to completely destroy your podcast or your business. Sometimes you just need a break from these things, and I think that taking that break when you feel that need to, is way more important than pushing yourself to be consistent on all of these places. 24/7,
