Podcasting is a growing medium for consuming engaging content. People from all walks of life listen to podcasts regularly. Businesses and brands are also using podcasts as an engaging medium to educate, communicate, entertain, and share.

The success of podcasts, and audio as a medium in general, can be ascribed to the fact that the spoken word is our oldest form of communication. When you listen to something via headphone or earphones, it is a very intimate and trusted source of information. Also, a podcast allows you to multitask, you can do household chores, or exercise for example, and still engage with the world, whereas engaging with a video monopolize your visual senses and limits you to that medium.

By turning the spoken word into text – you can give your podcasts another dimension for use and another level of potential engagement.

So, if audio by itself is so engaging and such a trusted medium, why bother to transcribe in the first place?

  • Improve content SEO and discoverability – When transcribing your podcast, you are creating a way for search engines to crawl your content and display it search results such as Google. This is a new mode that lets you draw more traffic if you provide a transcript of the text.
  • Social media post – social media is an important factor in the growth and engagement of a podcast. With a podcast transcript at your disposal, you can make your podcast easier to share on all social media platforms. Create snippets, great quotes, funny highlights, or engaging interviews. They all become easier to share when available in text-form and increase the shareability of content.
  • Captions and subtitles – if you transcribe podcasts, you are creating a text version that can easily be turned into captions or subtitles for videos. Have you ever seen a promotion for a podcast that comes up in a social feed and plays automatically? They are being used everywhere. But, if you have the volume off and a still image, the content is not very engaging. By having captions playing, a user will start to read and, if engaged, will turn on the volume and listen. This is how social media now works!
  • Make content searchable – Want to find a time when you spoke about “solar energy”, “Margot Robbie” or “Phil Collins”? If you only have audio and video files, you can’t easily find these exact mentions or the exact places it was mentioned. With transcription, every single one of your podcast episodes becomes searchable and re-purposely. It’s an essential element in the podcast marketing mix.
  • It’s very easy, fast, accurate and affordable. We use Sonnant.com for its speed, cost, timestamps, ability to search and use custom vocabulary and accuracy. Also, Sonnant has a lot of essential built-in transcription tool such as automatic captions, snippets, summaries, and social posts.
  • Increase useability and engagement of content – turn long form, spoken word content into blogs, articles social posts, extracts, snippets and more.
  • Better comprehension and better user experience – people like to read.
  • Accessibility for deaf and hard of hearing users

The need to transcribe your podcast is the building-blocks of turning the spoken word into discoverable content that will help target, reach, engage and build your audience. Further, the ability to re-package and re-purpose podcasts into short-form socials and snippets will drive organic reach which will save you oodles of time and money.