Mini-Podcasting Is on the Rise – Here’s What You Need to Know
Ever thought about producing short, bite-sized episodes of your podcast to see if you can reach a wider audience? There’s a growing trend in mini-podcasting going on right now that you might want to take advantage of.
Podcasters are jacking the popular microformat of ‘daily briefing’ news podcasts (think: The Daily) and using it as a way to engage listeners who have less time to commit to a full long-form podcast episode when listening on the go.
If you’re like more than half of all other podcasters, it’s likely your episodes last between 30-60 minutes. But when you think about it, most of the common daily tasks we perform while listening to podcasts take less than the duration of an episode to complete; walking the dog, doing the daily commute, eating breakfast or getting ready for work in the morning.
So why do we feel the need to stay loyal to long-form audio content? Here’s a (suitably) quick dive into mini-podcasting and why you might want to give it a try.
What is Mini-Podcasting?
Mini, micro, short-form, bite-sized, pocket-sized, whatever-you-like-to-call-it-podcasts are short episodes lasting anything between 1-20 minutes.
This type of short, deep-dive audio content was popularized by The Daily, which was Apple’s most downloaded podcast of 2018. Since then, daily shows have raged in popularity. By 2019, they’d already earned their own discoverability tag on Apple podcasts.
While daily news podcasts make up just 1% of all those podcasts produced, they account for more than 10% of downloads in the US. So clearly, there’s a huge demand for short-form audio content like this, and it doesn’t need to be limited to news content either.
Why You Should Try Micro-Podcasting
The benefits involved in mini-podcasting (for you and your listeners) are pretty vast.
For listeners, there’s less commitment involved. They can consume more information in less time, and this really taps into the global productivity obsession. New tools are even emerging on the podcasting market where micro-podcasts are sent to your smartphone by SMS so you don’t have to waste time looking for mini-podcasts you might like.
For podcasters, the benefits of micro-podcasting are huge too. One report by Reuters suggests micro-podcasting can help increase loyalty amongst listeners and reduce subscriber churn. And if that’s not enough, the same report suggests that producing short-form podcast content is a good way to engage younger audiences too.
We’re living in an age of micro-content, and there’s no reason why audio shouldn’t get a slice of the pie. Short snippets are easy to repurpose and cross-publish on other social platforms to promote your show. Posting these on Tiktok, Instagram and twitter could see you tap into a whole new audience.
And as you don’t need to delve too deep with micro audio content, this can make these shorter episodes easier to plan and produce.
Which takes us on nicely to the next point…
How to Start Mini-Podcasting with Mini-mum Effort
The good news is, you don’t need to start producing new podcast content every day to take advantage of this new trend.
In fact, when we tested it out, we found that we could create a week’s worth of podcast content (episodes lasting a few minutes each) in around 3 hours.
Check out this guide on how to create your own daily show and mini-podcast content.
