This summer we put together a listener survey, with a goal of getting some feedback and learning a little more about our Elixir Wizards audience.
Here's a quick overview of some of our findings.
Completion Rates
We were hoping to get at least 30 responses, so we were pleased to have 51 total completions at the end of our three week run.
How listeners found the podcast
I was surprised at the number of listeners who found our podcast via their podcast player as opposed to social media or Elixir social forums. My expectation was that most listeners found us via the Elixir community directly; it is neat to know that listeners are finding us in other ways as well.
Listening habits
As our podcast episodes have gotten longer, we wanted to check in on typical podcast listening habits over the course of a week. 66% of our listeners typically listen to podcasts for an hour or more in a week's time, which is good sign for us since our episodes are currently running around 40-60 minutes.
We also asked about whether folks listen to other technical podcasts, and if so, what some of their favorites are. All the other Elixir podcasts featured heavily in the responses, and The Bike Shed, Changelog, and Full Stack Radio each got several mentions.
Positive and Negative Feedback
The questions we asked prompting for positive and negative feedback on the podcast overall didn't get us super useful answers. Listeners did mention specific guests, episodes, and themes they enjoyed, but we didn't get much high level "do more of this / less of that" feedback. In hindsight, I think the wording of the questions could be improved to prompt for the kinds of feedback we were hoping to get.
Brand Recognition
Most respondents — 84% — got this one right! This is good news for us, since we run the podcast as a contribution to the community but also to help us gain visibility as a consultancy working with Elixir.
Pattern Matching Feedback
This season, we tested out an idea that friend of the podcast Todd Resudek had, which was to create mini-episodes or segments, focused on getting to know members of the community better: Pattern Matching with Todd. We tested out launching these as separate episodes as well as bundling them with full episodes, and were curious which the audience preferred.
Only about half of our respondents had heard a Pattern Matching segment, and of those who had, opinions were split evenly as to how they'd prefer to listen to them.
Takeaways
Overall we're glad we put the survey together; we got some good insights and have some good learnings to apply for the next time we want to gather listener feedback.
As always if you have feedback or ideas for the podcast, we'd love to hear them! Email your thoughts to us at [email protected].
Also we still have sticker packs left over from ElixirConf; if you'd like us to mail you one, fill out the request form here.
