How to use comments and polls to increase audience engagement for your show

Why audience engagement is important for you and your audience

In a recent study we conducted among listeners, 73% said they are interested in finding more opportunities to interact with their favorite podcast hosts. The opportunity for listeners and viewers to engage with you strengthens their connection, leading to greater loyalty, which contributes to overall listener growth. That community you build will spread your show around by word-of-mouth and through discussion on social media.

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Comments and polls are a great way to let listeners and viewers participate in the development of your show or podcast and allow them to become collaborators. Their feedback and engagement can help you shape your content, give you ideas and inspiration, and provide insight into what they like and want to hear or see from you. 

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Poll results and comments from your audience also create content for you to discuss on your show and sharing some of your favorite comments across your social channels is an easy way to engage your fans after you’ve published an episode.

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Keep in mind that the audience want to hear back from you! Make sure to like and reply to your favorite comments to keep them coming back and inspire others to participate. And remember, users will be notified when you like or reply to their comment to bring them back to your show!

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By engaging with your fans directly on Spotify, you’ll be able to reach them where they are already listening to or watching your show. The influx of listener feedback all funnels into your Spotify for Creators dashboard for easy access. The Comments tab on your dashboard is your one stop shop to like, reply, create, and manage comments and polls across your entire show.

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Spotify's interactivity features make it easy to get input directly from your fans, as experienced by Ben Wilson, How to Take Over the World:

As a podcast focused on the lessons we can learn from history's greatest leaders, I'm always curious which takeaways resonate most with my audience. Comments on Spotify provide me that invaluable feedback, which makes creating my podcast that much more rewarding and allows me to build a stronger connection with my listeners

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Audience engagement best practices with comments

Get the most out of these interactive features to mutually benefit you and your audience. These tactics will increase your audience engagement and accelerate your podcast’s evolution.

Leave a call to action in your episodes

Comments and polls give you access to your audience and the opportunity to get to know them, but they need to know where and how they can engage.

And the easiest way for them to find out is directly from you! Make sure to build a call to action into your episode scripts, preferably in both the episode intro and outro so audiences know that you want to hear from them. 

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Here’s a sample script you can use: “Make sure to rate and follow my show on Spotify. And don’t forget to drop a comment on this episode! We’re looking to hear everyone’s stories about [Insert relevant question on the episode topic]. We can’t wait to hear from you and we’ll be replying to our favorites all week! 

To go even further, one way to increase engagement even more is to customize discussion questions to your listeners and viewers related to each episode. Michael Tucker uses this approach for Beyond the Screenplay, his podcast that explores the stories behind films.

For each episode we release, we include a question related to the film or the topics of discussion. For example, for our episode on the film ‘Whiplash,’ we asked listeners what are their favorite movie about obsessed artists. It’s a fun, quick way to learn more about our listeners

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This is equally effective for getting to know your fans as individuals. Beyond the realm of the podcast space, also ask listeners to share stories, experiences, or details about themselves. Questions like how their day is going, their favorite travel destination, what their first concert was, etc., can inspire them to engage.
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Discover your listeners’ and viewers' needs with polls 

To help provide the highest value possible for your listeners and viewers, find out their pain points, struggles, unrequited desires, and any other unmet needs.

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If you’re struggling to think of what to ask your audience, Scott Lynch of “The Motivated Mind” podcast has insight from his own first-hand experience:

Think about the podcasts you listen to; what questions would you want from the creator? How would you like to interact with the creator?

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One way to do this is to ask more direct questions about what the audience wants out of your show they haven’t yet received, like “what’s a topic you want to learn about we haven’t covered?” or “what can we teach you about or answer for you in a future episode?”

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Polls are perfect for this because they allow you to guide your listeners and viewers towards specific multiple-choice options of your selection. “Polls are a great way to discover where your personal excitement and your listeners’ excitement overlap. Polls allows you to maintain some control over the content you create by offering specific options you’re already excited about, yet still involve your audience in the decision-making process,” says Tucker.

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And don’t underestimate the fact that it’s easier for your audience to engage with a poll using a single tap of their finger, so if you are looking for a quick way to gather feedback, polls are the way to go.

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Polls are better at helping you, as a creator, gather feedback when deciding between specific options. For example, if we know we want to talk about a scary movie for Halloween, but we can’t decide which our audience will enjoy most, a poll is a quick and easy way to make a decision.

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Source inspiration from your audience

Poll results and audience feedback in the comments can steer segments or entire episodes based on input about episode topics, discussion questions, and guest recommendations, among other content-related components. During episodes, you can choose to reveal poll results or highlight your favorite comments and spend time discussing them in detail. On a higher level, this could even be fodder for an entire show or podcast concept. What if your show was solely based on the questions you ask your audience and their responses? Get creative and have fun with it. The possibilities are vast.
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If you find that you’re in a creative rut or are simply curious about the potential of an idea, use polls or take a look at audience feedback as a workshop space to explore further and test the waters. Says Tucker: 

We’ve used polls to help us make decisions about the future of our show. When we’re weighing options (like which movie trilogy should we cover next), it’s been great to let our listeners share what they are most excited about via polls

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Comments can also be a way to gauge the impact of previous episodes and their concepts. Suppose you offered a book recommendation about the topic you discussed in a given episode. You can use comments to understand/figure out/gauge whether your fans read the book, what they thought of your take/opinion, and whether they'd like to get more content recs from you in the future. This type of feedback gives you the opportunity to learn from your audience and even spark engaging conversations well after the episode has aired

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Share listeners’ and viewers' input

The next step after you receive responses is to share them. This is key to promoting these features for your podcast and inspiring audience participation.

There are a variety of ways to share fan comments and poll results, starting with discussing them in your episodes. Specifically, with comments, you can share your favorites and shout out the person it came from. This will encourage them to tune in to hear if their response will be mentioned and talked about on the show.

Tucker leads with this early on in his episodes to hook listeners and viewers quickly.

To encourage listener participation, make sure to mention any questions or polls in the podcast episode itself. For example, we try to mention the questions at the top of our episodes: ‘And for all of our listeners using the Spotify app, our question for you guys is…

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In addition to the episodes themselves, share notable responses on the online channels where you actively promote your podcast, including social media and email.

How comments and polls work

Now that you understand how and why creators have been using comments and polls on Spotify, let’s show you what it looks like in Spotify for Creators. On both the web and mobile app, the Comments tab is the place to create, edit, and manage listener feedback across your show.

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At a glance you’ll be able to view all published listener comments across your show, sorted by the most recent episode. Or, do a deep dive by clicking “show all” to see all comments on an episode. Finally, you can add a poll to an existing episode by heading to the Polls subtab.

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All creators will need to approve comments before they appear on the episode page. They can be reviewed in the “Needs review” section of the new Comments tab. 

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Like and reply to your favorite comments to automatically push them live, or approve comments individually by clicking the checkmark icon. Remember, you are limited to a single reply to each listener comment (and fans cannot respond back to you) so make sure to wrap up the conversation in your reply.

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Don't want comments on a specific episode or your entire show? You have full control over the feature, and can disable them at any time by accessing the settings in the upper right corner.

Creating polls is also simple. Just add your question and create up to seven options for your listeners to choose from (you can even choose between single select or allow listeners to select multiple options). You can control how long the poll runs for; the real-time responses will display during that time frame, and the final results will appear on your episode page after it closes.

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You can have one poll and comments live on every episode on Spotify so experiment with what works best for your show or podcast.

Audience engagement makes podcasting a two-way street

Audience engagement tears down the limitations placed on the podcast format since its inception. Whereas before, podcasting was mostly output and little input, now creators can have a real exchange with their audience.

“Creating a podcast is rewarding because you’re building a community. A community of like-minded individuals. These interactions provide a podium for those on the other side of the microphone. Being a podcaster isn’t always about talking; it’s just as much about listening. This gives us inspiration to hear how our words have impacted the listener’s life and how they’re passing along that knowledge,” says Lynch.

“These features allow you to hear from—and show your appreciation for—the people who care the most about the work you’re doing,” says Tucker.

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