Compared to YouTube and social media, podcasting has the least number of ways for audiences to communicate with creators. That means podcast creators and audiences might feel pretty cut off from each other. 

But paradoxically, this works in your favor: podcast audiences are excited to tell you what they think if you give them the opportunity. Here’s how to build audience engagement right into your podcast.

You gotta be intentional about it

The RSS feed is a wonderful thing: a relatively ancient piece of technology that drops podcast episodes into podcatchers seamlessly. But it includes no comment section or ways to directly reply—regardless of Spotify’s attempts on their app

Luckily, there's a real opportunity here. As any creative person knows, there’s strength in constraints, and audiences are itching to tell you what they’re thinking and feeling. What you have to do is integrate that participation directly into the show.

And since audiences know you as a person and not a username on the internet, they’re quite nice about participating. All you have to do is ask for exactly the type of participation you’re looking for and reward the people who are actively contributing to the community. This might become such a regular occurrence that you fold in an Email Corner segment into your show or regularly dip into the Mailbag for questions and good stories.

Modeling what you want to see

When I’m recording a podcast, I often think about the best piece of advice I ever got as a camp counselor. When you’re trying to get a group of pre-teens to do something, the best thing to do is show that you’re excited about it. Need them to get into the lake? Be the first one to jump in. Need them to go to sleep? Get very into the story of the serial killer who lives down by the lake and then snuff out the light.

This goes for podcast audiences as well, and it is communicated with this loop of audience participation. It goes like this: 

1. Reward good questions and comments by reading them on mic
2. Audiences will know what types of questions and comments are usually read
3. Audiences will write in better questions and comments
4. Repeat

The worst thing you can do as a podcaster is complain that “everyone tweeted at me that I was wrong about __________” or “we got soooo many emails that I mispronounced ________.” First of all, it makes you sound entitled and snotty, which doesn’t help anyone. But you’re training your audience to know that you read their mean tweets, really care about their mean tweets, and that you’ll respond if they criticize you. This is NOT the opportunity to kick off that cycle; resist the urge to call out the haters on the mic.

Ask specific questions

Your audience will write in with questions and comments of their own, but you can get the participation train going by giving them a prompt. The trick here is asking for something specific to separate the wheat from the chaff. And the detailed prompt will push your funniest listeners to give you your best stuff.

Here’s what you could ask for:

• A specific subject of stories: “Give us your best wedding stories where the focus wasn’t on the bride and groom!”
• A specific expert who can clear up a dispute: “If we have any entomologists or etymologists in the crowd who were wrongfully hired for linguistic or bug work, email us!”
• A divisive question that needs in-depth or off-the-wall answers: “Where does the Midwest begin?”

By embracing this participation, you can model what “good answers” are and reject and ignore the “bad answers,” which will keep the good vibes going. The Ringer Fantasy Football show actively inverts “bad participation” into good participation by actively asking questions they think they’ll get emails for in the first place. The three hosts know their quirks: they wonder openly about what they don’t know and mispronounce words constantly. So whenever the trio gets stuck in the “hosts trying to correct each other without googling it” cul-de-sac that so many podcasters find themselves stuck in, Danny Heifiz usually breaks it up by asking for emails. For example: “Email us at [email] about the animal you think you can fight.”

Not only does it relieve the know-it-all qualities of podcasters that turn off audiences, but the email segments at the end of every show never have anything to do with fantasy football—a refreshing break even if you need to know where to draft Cole Kmet. And when the show goes 3 times weekly during FF season, participating in the digressions has an immediate payoff when a listener emails on Monday and has the chance to be acknowledged on Wednesday.

The voicemail line is open

If you want to kick this up a notch, open a voicemail line for your show. All it takes is a Google Voice number and you have a digital mailbox bursting with real voices from your real listeners. This has an incredible upside: the only thing listeners love more than hearing their questions read aloud is hearing their voice on the podcast. And the intimacy and human connection you get through someone’s voice is the backbone of podcasting. 

The biggest downside is audio quality; folks will be using the absolute worst microphones through their headphones and speaker phones, so you’ll have to determine what audio is even intelligible. Make sure to level the audio to match the sound levels of the rest of the show so people aren’t turning the volume up and down constantly.

Two final tips

Don’t rely on audience submissions too much! It’s a delicate balance between “Wow, that’s my question on my favorite show” and “the hosts of my favorite show have been phoning it in and rely on the audience for all their content.” Unless you’re starting a show that provides a service to people writing in (like an advice show or Reply All’s Super Tech Support), keep Mailbag episodes to maybe once or twice a year.

If you are starting an advice show, I am giving you permission—for the first few episodes—to make up some questions and pretend they’re from someone else. Remember, you want to model good questions, so model them!