When life meets art...
Social media & thumbnails
The finishing touches
Once your podcast episode has been recorded and edited, it is time to create a super thumbnail for the hosting platform, along with some socials to let the world know what is about to hit the soundwaves.
The hosting platform (aka aggregator) is where you will load and schedule the finished pod for distribution. You will load your thumbnail here.
Oftentimes people will also embed their pods onto their podcast website page as well. If instead you wish to load your pod here manually because of esthetics or because you want to add different componants to the shownotes section, such as a blog or a transcript, you may choose to load a different thumbnail here, or at least a different size of the same thumbnail to the website.
The process
Let's talk about the importance of visually stunning thumbnails. I prefer to use Canva Pro, a user-friendly design tool, to create eye-catching thumbnails for the podcast episode thumbnail as well as for social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. These thumbnails are crucial for catching the attention of potential customers and followers, making sure your brand stands out among the sea of content found online.
With social media thumbnails, you can request as many prepared posts (thumbnail + Copy) as you like but for episode release I usually recommend four per pod. One sound clip post, one quote, one thumbnail promoting the guest and one thumbnail about the podcast over all. Of course you can request more or less of any of these should you want to. Each thumbnail social media post will come with fresh social media copy along with tags and social links.
While some podcasts prefer to use the same thumbnail on their hosting platform each time for consistency, some like the idea of changing it up each episode, adding the guests' image for example.
It often helps to create a special template for this purpose, so that your brand colour scheme and sizes and spacing is uniform, this helps to keep things looking professional. If you are looking to establish a longterm relationship where I would be creating posts every time you release a podcast episode then I would work with you to create a large batch (20) of social media template designs using your preferred colours and fonts. I would then pull several from this batch each episode, making the necessary changes to titles, photos etc.
In order to create something appropriate for your needs, having a clear idea of your style and the vibe you are going for is essential and creating artwork is a process!
