(119) Relationship Between Marketing Through Social Media and Listener Downloads of an Educational Pharmacy Podcast

Objective : To assess the correlation between social media use as a form of marketing for podcast episodes and the number of unique downloads per episode.

Methods: A niche educational podcast with 63 episodes and 11,000 unique downloads aimed at post-graduate training preparation for pharmacy students was produced from January 2021 to February 2024. The podcast was available globally on all available podcast players with a modest social media following. Information on social media posts across four social media platforms was tagged to individual episodes including platform and number of posts. Downloads were calculated as total downloads and downloads since publication. Statistical analysis on correlation involved point-biserial correlation coefficient for continuous and nominal comparisons and Kendall’s coefficient of rank correlation tau-sub-b for continuous and ordinal comparisons.

Results: The mean downloads per episode and downloads since episode publication were 181.7 and 3.6, respectively. A total of 28 episodes had 2 or more social media posts. There was no significant correlation between episode downloads or downloads since publication and whether a marketing post was made to a social media platform (p=.246 and p=.192, respectively). There was also no significant correlation between episode downloads and downloads since publication and the specific platform or number of social media posts per episode (all outcomes p>.05).

Conclusions: For niche educational podcast intended for a national or global audiences, social media posts may not positively or negatively impact unique downloads and efforts to market the podcast may be better served through alternative methods.