Enhance Your Story and Create More Easily Accessible Podcasts with Chapters
Ask yourself: how accessible is your podcast? Can listeners follow your story, or get through your content in one sitting? Could they more fully appreciate your podcast with extra background information or references?
Accessibility isn’t just about making sure your podcast is available on every listening platform, or blowing up people’s social network feeds. It also lies in the structure of your content, how well you tell your story, and the marketing strategies you use to hook listeners in; your podcast needs to be easy to consume for listeners.
Spreaker is now giving you the ability to add chapters to your episode through our CMS. With chapters, you can delineate a clear outline of key points and favorite moments that listeners can get to easily, and create new ways to share your content.
How do chapters work?
Chapters are visual markers, taking the form of images, text, and links, that highlight different parts of your episode. Through the CMS, they can be placed along specific points of the waveform by clicking on “+” and adding all the relevant information you’d like your listener to know:
They can signal the beginnings to different segments, or acts, of your episode, lead to interviews, include links to outside articles, and more.
Once they’re set, they’ll be visible across Spreaker’s listening platforms. Chapters will appear in the embedded player, Spreaker Podcast Radio for both Android and iOS, and Spreaker.com.
Give your listeners the bigger picture
With chapters, listeners are given visual cues that invite them to engage with your content in a different way. They’re handy guides that lead to specific moments relevant to their interests, without the endless seeking and searching. Chapters are also useful if your episodes tend to run quite long; they’ll break the episode down into digestible pieces that listeners can consume at their own leisure – especially if they’re short on time.
As mentioned earlier, chapters can include not just titles, but images and links too. You can add interviewee headshots, pictures from your latest trip, and infographics, or link to specific news articles, recipes, and special offers – anything that can add greater context to your podcast and enrich your listeners’ experience.
3 ways to use chapters in your content marketing strategy
Chapters are especially helpful to podcasters – particularly when it comes to ramping up content marketing strategies. They’re versatile enough to lead into lots of other kinds of mediums and networks. Here are just three ways chapters can effectively boost your own strategy:
- Use them to help break down your content to tell your story and find different hooks: so if your next episode is all about five tips on how to grow your business, create chapters based on each tip. Each title can be framed as a specific call-to-action.
- They also make sharing and repurposing your content really easy, especially if you’re looking for new angles to attract specific communities or sponsors. You can use the titles of your chapters as titles to related blog posts, tweets, or even focal points of marketing campaigns.
- And speaking of sponsors, if you’re monetizing your podcast, you can use chapters as a way to do double duty with your ad reads or revenue sharing programs: add links to offers and coupons that your listeners can reach, even when they’re not tuning in.
By adding chapters to your episodes, the benefits you get are two-fold: your listeners get easy access to clearly told stores, and can take advantage of outside sources that can give them a bigger picture of your topic; in turn, your content becomes easier to share through different networks and mediums, and amp up your monetization efforts.
Who wouldn’t want all that for their podcast? Go into Spreaker’s CMS and add chapters to your own episodes now!
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Thanks for adding this. Definitely one of the most underutilized tools of podcasting. Makes the listener experience so much better! Beyond that, I think, as podcasters, it can help us to organize episodes ahead of time because we start to think in complete thoughts/chapters.
Perfecto, esto es sencillo para los oyentes :v
Hola Uriel, si mucho más sencillo sobre todo a la hora de hacer marketing de contenido.
Espero ver muchos capítulos en tu podcast 🙂
Umm, a working example would be nice. Wink wink!
Hi Byron, you are right an example helps. Please have a look at this one, it is from our Spreaker Live Show: bit.ly/spreakerliveshow
Let me know if you have any additional question.
Why when I share my LINK on social media For people to listen to the podcast nobody can SEE the FOLLOW button???…..they only can see it if they go through the actual WEBSITE. Thats not cool or helpful at ALL!…..please look into that! Thanks
Hi Benny, yes the follow button is available just on the web as well as on the apps, the idea on the social media is to put out a call to action to be listened, that’s the reason why you see the play button on Facebook and the player embedded on Twitter for example. Hope this clarifies.
I like the idea but this has limited function outside the embedded Spreaker player. It’s not readily apparent for people to click the box arrow on the Spreaker.com player. Also the vast majority of our listeners are outside the Spreaker platform, so developing all of this for less that 5% of the listener base is hard to justify the effort. If the link moved to the Iphone player or YouTube, then that might increase the usage. Open the chapter link window automatically in another browser window. I want to explore this feature further, but this is my initial reaction. I’ll be most curious if this is integrated into the custom phone app.
Hi there, many thanks for your feedback, much appreciated.
I am not sure I did understand what you mean when you talk about the iPhone player. If you open the Spreaker app on iOS, chapters are supported there, so I guess you are talking about another tool and if this is the case, can I ask you why you are not using our mobile application? Also, did you see how chapters are displayed on the embedded player? You say that the majority of your listeners are not on Spreaker but if you have your own podcast site, you can easily insert our embedded player where chapters are supported and drive your audience there. Let me know what you think about, thanks!
This is amazing Tonia. Will the chapters also appear in the embedded payers on our websites?
Yes, Mark and actually they look amazing in the embedded players 🙂 Try them out and let me know!
Buenas, ¿podéis implementar que aquellos que ya creamos los capítulos con imágenes y enlaces en el .mp3 se carguen directamente en la App? Es una faena tener que hacer dos veces el trabajo…
Hola y gracias por el comentario.Los capítulos que hays creado con las apps de Spreaker se leen de forma automática en los reproductores, lo que si puedes hacer si te apetece es modificarlos por ejemplo editando los títulos, añadiendo imagenes o enlaces pero el trabajo no hay que hacerlo dos veces, simplemente a través del CMS lo puedes mejorar. Espero quede más claro ahora 🙂
Hi Tania me gustaria saber como cambiar en nombre de mi link por uno mas especifico y similar a mi branding me puedes ayudar por favor en esto gracias
Hola Charlie, puedes cambiar el nombre de tu perfil sólo una vez y lo puedes hacer aquí https://www.spreaker.com/account/profile
Si ya lo has hecho una vez y tienes una URL personalizada, contacta con nuestro servicio al cliente a este correo support@spreaker.com y ellos te ayudarán para hacerlo. Gracias.