Will We Ever Get Better Podcast Engagement?

Few things make podcasters happier than a slew of emails from deeply engaged listeners filled with praise for the latest episode. Good work if you can get it. But should you expect and encourage it?   Do you want more engagement from your listeners? Sure. But do your listeners want to engage with you? Well... Keep in mind that for almost every type of creator—books, tv shows, movies, Michelin-rated chefs—engagement with their audience is rare. And engagement during the time of creation is unheard of. Some of the perceived need for podcasters to get immediate feedback stems from the podcasting versus radio fight that's going on two decades now. Our RSS feeds could out-distance their radio towers. But they could have live callers. And we couldn't. Boo. Should we podcasters give up on the idea of getting more engagement from our listeners? No. But we probably should better understand what engagement opportunities we do have. Not all engagements need to be live. And I'm encouraged by the efforts of companies like PodInbox who are improving podcast-specific forms of engagement. But at the same time, maybe podcasting already have enough engagement from listeners? Searching, finding, subscribing to or following, listening...  These are forms of engagement that our listeners are doing right now. And honestly, it's the kind of engagement that podcasts are best set up to receive.  I almost hate to say it, but the majority of your audience will not get any benefit from engaging more deeply with you or your podcast than they already are. It is very natural for us to want more engagement from our audience. But we serious podcasters need to first make sure we're giving our audience good reasons to engage with our content in the first place. ----- Links Getting more than 10K downloads per episode? Talk to https://evoterra.link/gumball (Gumball.fm)!  https://podcastpontifications.com/episode/giving-your-podcasts-listeners-a-public-voice-with-podinbox (Giving Your Podcast's Listeners A Public Voice With PodInbox ) https://evoterra.link/podinbox (PodInbox) - A place for your audience to ask questions and share their stories. Over 100K active podcasters trust https://evoterra.link/buzz (Buzzsprout). This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy Podsights - https://podsights.com/privacy Support this podcast