Repurposing Podcast Content Across Multiple Platforms

Back in the day, podcasts were audio only. There were only a couple of ways to listen to them: in dedicated podcast apps, or on websites. YouTube hadn't yet become popular, Instagram wasn't around, Twitter hadn't surfaced, and TikTok wasn't even an idea. Now, with all those social media platforms, shouldn't your podcast be everywhere?

It's a good idea to make your podcasts available on all the platforms people use for podcast listening, and it can be helpful to share clips of your podcast on different social media platforms to attract new listeners.

Full episode distribution

Whether your podcast is audio, video, or both, you should still use the traditional means of distribution: an RSS feed that points to a podcast hosting company such as Fireside. This ensures that it gets picked up by all the podcast directories, those managed by Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and others, and allows listeners to get your episodes as soon as they are released. Your podcast should also be available on its own dedicated website, which you may manage, or which may be included with your podcast hosting.

If you create a video podcast, you should definitely upload it to YouTube, but even if your podcast is audio only, it should be on YouTube. If you submit an audio podcast's RSS feed to YouTube, it will create a "video" of each episode using the podcast's artwork and its full audio, and also make it accessible on YouTube Music, which is one of the fast-growing services for podcast listening. You can choose to edit your own audio podcast for YouTube, perhaps with changing graphics or with a waveform overlay; in that case, you'll have to manually upload each episode.

Create short video clips to share on social media

All podcasters want to grow their audience. They want listeners to discover their podcasts, and this can be difficult with the vast number of podcasts available. One way to get noticed is by sharing short video clips on platforms like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, and also sharing them on non-video platforms like X, Bluesky, WhatsApp, and others.

Podcasters can create short clips that highlight key moments, quotes, or engaging discussions from their podcasts, which can act as trailers to potentially get new subscribers. You can do this manually using video editing tools such as Adobe Premiere, Apple's iMovie, Camtasia, and others, for video podcasts. And if your podcast is audio only, you can use these apps to make videos using the podcast audio, artwork, and other graphics.

There are services that can automatically create video clips from podcasts, some using AI to find salient moments to share. Services like Veed, OpusClip, and Kapwing can create clips by analyzing your podcasts and finding key moments. If you use Riverside to record and edit your podcast, it can create clips after you've finished prepping your episode for upload. All of these services can create clips in multiple formats, from standard HD to vertical videos, which are so important for services like TikTok and YouTube Shorts.

Create written content from episodes

While podcasts are audio or video media, they are text-based; the words that the hosts and guests speak are what make a podcast. For now, audio isn't indexed by search engines, and it can be useful to leverage the texts of your podcasts. Many services generate transcripts of podcasts, but these may not always be searchable outside podcast player apps.

You can create your own transcripts and post them with your episodes on the podcast website, which can provide SEO value to your topics and guests. This is essential for niche podcasts. If people search for a topic that isn't covered widely, or for people who have been guests, they stumble on a podcast when searching for that topic through standard search engines.

You can create transcripts using a number of services, such as Otter, or use apps like MacWhisper, which leverages a number of open-source transcription engines and allows you to enter an API key to use AI services for this purpose. If you use Riverside, along with its recording, editing, and video clip features, you also get transcripts.

Don't post transcripts without editing them, however. AI transcription is good, but not perfect. You especially need to make sure that names are spelled correctly and that key terms that are part of your podcast topic aren't erroneous.

Another way to use the text of your podcasts is to create articles from your episodes. These could be summaries of the discussions, or of interviews if your podcast features guests. You get the SEO advantage, having text content, but you can also filter out the least interesting parts of the episodes. There's more work here than just correcting a transcript, and it requires a skilled writer to create them, but these articles can be valuable on their own, providing useful content and leading readers to your podcast.

Don't just repurpose new episodes

If your podcast has been around for a while, and you start repurposing some content from new episodes, you should also go back to some of your more interesting older episodes and create videos and/or text content for them as well. Focus on the most interesting guests, look at your podcast download statistics, and repurpose the most popular episodes. Think of each video clip as an ad for your podcast; think of each transcript or article as an SEO boost. You don't need to do this for all your episodes, but highlight the best of what you've done to entice new listeners.