WHY PODCASTERS ARE TRUSTED THE MOST
In episode 4 of The PR Podcast Edge, Mark sits down with PR consultant Lindsay Reid to unpack a new report from Acast on trust, podcasting, and why listeners believe podcast hosts over almost anyone else trying to sell them something.
In this episode
What Acast’s trust report actually found, why podcast hosts are beating influencers and celebrities on trust, the “parasocial relationship” concept from a PR perspective, and what it means for how businesses should be spending their marketing budget.
What the Acast report actually found.
Acast, one of the largest podcast platforms, hosting around 140,000 podcasts worldwide, polled between 2,500 and 2,600 regular podcast listeners on who they actually trust.
The headline finding: 56% of weekly podcast listeners say podcast hosts are the type of influencer they trust most, ahead of celebrities and social media influencers. And it goes further than general trust. 62% of podcast fans trust recommendations and adverts from their favourite podcast hosts, compared with just 15% who trust the same from social media influencers.
As Mark put it on the episode: those numbers should be enough on their own to make businesses, brands and thought leaders think seriously about starting a podcast.
Why podcast hosts beat influencers on trust.
Lindsay’s read on why comes down to time and saturation. Podcasts run long, twenty minutes at a minimum, often much longer, and listeners who follow a show regularly end up spending real hours with that host over time. Social media, by contrast, is short, sharp clips from an increasingly crowded field.
Lindsay Reid: “Social media trust levels are lower than ever, partly because it’s saturated, and partly because we know a lot of people are just getting paid to tell us about stuff. With podcasters, it’s almost like they’re giving more of themselves to us in exchange, so we trust them more.”
There’s also a repetition effect that works specifically in podcasting’s favour. A listener might not act on an ad the first few times they hear it, but by the ninth or tenth time, especially when the host relates it back to their own life, it starts to land differently than a one-off influencer post ever could.
The parasocial relationship.
One term from the report Mark and Lindsay spent real time on: the parasocial relationship, the sense a listener develops, after enough hours of listening, that they actually know the people on a podcast. They don’t, but consistent, long-form, regularly released content builds that feeling anyway.
From a PR standpoint, Lindsay’s take is that this comes down to authenticity rather than oversharing. You don’t need to reveal everything about your life on a podcast. Small, relatable details, and being honest about how something made you feel, do more work than people expect.
Lindsay Reid: “If you’re giving out genuinely helpful advice and someone tries it and it works for them, the level of trust skyrockets after that. They’ve already proven to themselves that listening to you is worth their time.”
What this means for your marketing budget.
Mark’s argument, one he’s made consistently at the studio, is that podcasting isn’t an added cost on top of PR, marketing and comms spend, it’s a way of making that spend go further. A podcast produces rich, long-form content about a business, its strategy and the people behind it, content that keeps working long after the episode goes out.
The report backs this up in an unexpected way: it places podcast hosts in the same trust bracket as journalists, well above influencers and celebrities. For a business thinking about where to put its comms budget, that’s a meaningfully different category of trust to be building toward.
Mark and Lindsay are picking this thread up again in a future episode, looking at Steven Bartlett and Diary of a CEO as a case study in what happens when that trust gets stretched. Worth subscribing if that’s a conversation you want to catch.
Thinking about starting a podcast?
Come talk to us about it
Book a session, or get in touch first if you want to talk through the format.
