Comments are here! We have evolved our Q&A feature referenced in this piece to comments, where you can now like and reply to messages from your fans. While our feature has evolved, the insights and takeaways below about engaging with your fans still apply. If you've used Q&A in the past, don't worry: your existing Q&A replies will still appear in the comments section of those episodes.
Engaging with your audience goes far beyond simply publishing your podcast—it creates a two-way conversation, a genuine connection between you and your listeners. When your audience is engaged, they become invested in your podcast, eagerly spread the word, tune in consistently, and provide valuable feedback.
That sounds great in theory. But the reality for many creators is that conversations are spread out across too many channels and none of them are happening where your listeners can actually consume the content—not until Spotify created a unique solution to tackle these very challenges.
The team behind “Science Vs” are no strangers to the hurdles of engaging listeners while juggling all the other podcast-adjacent tasks. So they turned to Spotify’s fan engagement features, and successfully paved a new road to boost their connection with listeners. The experiment led to impressive results:
- Listeners who participated with Q&A and polls consumed on average 58% more hours of the new season.
- Listeners who participated in Q&A and polls had on average a 26% higher completion of the new season.
Read on to learn how you can experience similar success as “Science Vs” from the host and executive producer, Wendy Zukerman, and supervising editor, Blythe Terrell.
Science Vs, the friendly fact-checkers of the podcasting world
Back in 2015, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation reached out to Wendy, a life-long science lover and science journalist, about starting a podcast, and soon “Science Vs” was born. The show is going on eight years, now on its 14th fourteenth season, and the team is devoted to fact-checking common beliefs—from the best hangover cures to how much water you should actually be drinking.
Speaking on the origins of the podcast and what inspired her approach, Wendy says she wanted to “look at things that were in the zeitgeist and investigate them with this sort of scientific mindset. I just wanted to bring some excitement and humor to science, but also help people with their lives.”
And help she did. “Science Vs” has a dedicated fan base of, in Blythe’s words, “curious nerds” who consistently tune in to learn more about the world around them. The “Science Vs” team managed to cultivate this loyal following organically, based on the content they were already producing. But the team wanted to invest more deeply in audience engagement to take their show to the next level.
Too many channels, too much noise, not enough time
The team behind “Science Vs” know that engaging and communicating with listeners contributes to a stronger connection and, ultimately, growth. Prior to implementing Q&A and polls, the team would interact with their audience across various channels, mainly Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and email.
“We would let folks know we had new episodes there. We would ask for things like ideas for show topics. What do you want to see? What do you want to hear from “Science Vs”?,” explains Blythe.
But while these channels are a great component of any creator’s toolkit, especially for promoting your podcast, they don't always translate to more listeners, since they have to go to another platform to hear your show. The "Science Vs” team was excited about the ability to directly engage their audience on Spotify while they were already listening to the podcast.
Both Blythe and Wendy also point out that the “Science Vs” listener base and Spotify followers outnumbers their following on social media. So engaging with their listeners through external channels inevitably resulted in not reaching most of them. “Such a small percentage of our listenership even follows us in those spaces,” Blythe explains.
And even if you follow somebody, you don't see every post, you don't always catch everything. A lot of the time we were just putting stuff out into the void.
Using a variety of channels to collect feedback and interact with listeners created another challenge for the “Science Vs” team in terms of bandwidth. “Having to go and say, okay, let's remember to check Twitter and see what people are saying. Or who has the capacity to spend the time on Instagram, scroll through and figure out the responses if we ask a question? It's all very consuming from our end to manage those different platforms,” adds Blythe.
Ultimately, it was important for the “Science Vs” team to be able to express gratitude to their listeners and create an open space for fans to share their feedback and opinions about the show. “The success of our show really depends on whether something hits with our listeners,” says Blythe. “It's really important for us to stay in touch with them. And that has not always been easy to do.”
At least, not until they leveraged Q&A and polls, tools that are exclusively available on Spotify.
Fan engagement features: A direct link to Science Vs’ audience
Wendy’s love for science is inextricably linked to her love for data. When the host heard about the connection between audience interaction and long-term engagement, it was only natural for her to explore it further with “Science Vs”. “That was what got me excited, the idea of building a connection with the audience, having them stick around for longer. Something fun and special that they could do on Spotify,” she says.
The “Science Vs” team implemented both Q&A (for listeners to respond to open-ended questions) and polls (where the audience can vote on an answer from a set of pre-defined options).
Once they took these fan engagement features for a spin, the results were immediate. “We saw value right away,” says Blythe. “The first time around, we had 80 comments in the Q&A and almost 3,000 responses to the poll. As soon as we saw the responses rolling in and the engagement happening, it felt like a no-brainer to keep going.”
Implementing the fan engagement features was not only seamless but also an enjoyable process for the “Science Vs” team. “We have it set up in our workflow, because we have a lot of things we do for every episode,” Blythe explains. “So we basically built it into that process where the producer of the episode often will suggest a question. And then as a team, we'll talk about it and debate it. It's very fun to experiment with different types of questions.”
Wendy adds that “the audience just wants to have a bit of fun with these interactive features. It's fun to reveal a little bit of ourselves, that we're having fun and that the audience can play along.” Two perfect examples of this are the show’s hangover and skincare episodes, which both Blythe and Wendy recall with enthusiasm.
In the hangover episode, “Science Vs” invited listeners to share the worst place to be hungover (spoiler alert: it’s a job interview, closely followed by a kid’s birthday party). For the skincare episode, the team made up a series of funny names and had the audience vote on which was an actual skincare product. Blythe described the latter episode as “bananas” in terms of engagement, racking up over 9,000 responses to the poll. And the benefits didn’t end there!
A new engagement landscape: Higher completion rates, more hours consumed, and a better sense of community
Thanks to Q&A and polls, listeners of “Science Vs” now have a dedicated space to engage with the show, and the team can foster a greater sense of community. “People come back to spaces where they feel connected and that’s what’s nice about it,” says Blythe. “It creates a space where they can connect with you directly. They don’t have to go to a second location, so we get much more focused responses.”
The ability to collect more granular feedback also creates a positive loop of engagement. The “Science Vs” team hears directly from the audience about what they want to get from the show, and uses that data to give listeners what they ask for so they keep returning.
“Direct and immediate feedback is something we never really had before. But here, you’re getting information exactly from who you want to,” Blythe explains. “It’s a way for us to gather immediate data, and see if something's connecting with people. It helps us get an early sign of how something's going. And when that happens, we can say, should we promote this episode in a different way? Should we get this out? Can we build on this because we're seeing it happen in real time?”
It’s a way for us to gather immediate data, and see if something's connecting with people. It helps us get an early sign of how something's going.
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“Science Vs” is still in the early stages of experimenting with Q&A and polls, but the results are more than promising. According to “Science Vs” analytics, listeners who participated with Q&A and polls consumed on average 58% more hours of the new season, compared to those who did not. Equally impressive are the completion rates—in the first 9 episodes of the new season, listeners who participated in Q&A and polls had on average 26% higher completion of those 9 episodes.*
Both Blythe and Wendy are excited to keep experimenting with the fan engagement features and use them to keep informing future episodes and gain a deeper understanding of their audience.
Give your audience a voice with Spotify’s Q&A and polls
At the end of the day, engagement is all about giving your audience the opportunity to be involved in something they love. As Blythe puts it, “people want to participate in the show and they want to feel a connection. They are excited about being part of the journey and feel like they're not just consuming the show but also giving something back.”
If you’re excited about replicating the success of “Science Vs”, follow these best practices:
- Build Q&A and polls into your production process.
- Connect your question back to the episode’s content.
- Publish your favorite listener responses.
- Keep experimenting to learn the types of questions your audience engages the most with and whether they prefer Q&A, polls, or a combination of both.
Giving your audience a voice has never been easier. Follow the lead of the internet’s friendliest fact-checkers and get started with fan engagement features today!
*Disclaimer: Data from this Case Study was gathered between March 23 — May 11th 2023.
