Radio shows have increasingly become a community favorite within Clapper’s features. Radios are an amazing opportunity to really connect with your community and the value relies only on what’s spoken rather than just visual entertainment. For any radios newbies and veterans, it’s important to understand that hosting a radio show can be fun and exciting, but it can take a few tries to get the hang of it.

If you want to create a new radio and want your hosting skills to go one step further, we have laid out a few steps to turn you into the best radio host on Clapper!

Plan ahead🗓⏰

Planning your radio, is the first and most important step before hosting a good radio show. It’s also important to understand that some radios will be laid back and only involve chilling and talking without a plan, and that’s okay. But if you are interested in hosting a regular radio show there is a few steps you can take. Before hosting a radio show, you need ask yourself some questions to decide what kind of radio you want to have:

Time and Day: Do you want to host this radio weekly? If so, choose the day or days of the week you can host and make sure your schedule is cleared for those times. Consistency is important. When choosing the time consider your audience. When is your community more interactive? Night? Day? Are they mostly abroad? A way to test the waters is hosting a few casual radios before the official one to see which time will get you the most engagement.

Niche topic: Is you radio going to have a specific name? What are you going to talk about? Does it involved a specific topic or a variety of them? Our advice is to find a general topic and divided it in micro-topic for each week. For example:

Ex. 1:

“I will create a radio show called “Artist Spotlight”. On this radio show, our general topic will be “Highlighting artists”. Our micro-topic will be highlight different types of artists: Painters, designers, blacksmith, sculptors, singers, musicians, etc.”

Ex. 2:

“I will create a radio show call “Extreme Pranks”. Our general topic will be “Pulling pranks” and our micro-topic will be that it will be a different prank each week and different people will be pulling the pranks.

Get Creative: Questions, Games, interviews🧩🎯🎲

Radios take out the visual element, which is why is so important that what is said is so important. If your audience can only listen to you, make sure they are entertained and ready to vocally participate. Think of fun way to keep your audience entertained.

• If it’s a podcast, come up with interesting topics every week and from time to time bring guest to discuss with you.
• If it’s a game show, you can implement trivia, truth or false, guess the name, speed round questions, never have I ever, the options are limitless. You can also create your own original activities.
• If it’s a talk show, have a niche of people that you can interview. If your show is about Veterans, interview a different veteran each week and talk about their experiences and give resources to help veterans.

Spread The Word🗣

Your community can’t attend if you don’t let them know in advance you are hosting a radio show. Sharing your radio and spreading the word is as important as planning it. We highly recommend you have promo videos leading up to the show. Also spread the word in your group chat, as well as other group chats that allow outside promotion. When your radio goes live, make sure to notify your audience by pressing the “notify button”. Also, make sure that if you have guest speakers, you make them moderators so they can notify their audience.

Radio Manners🤵🏻‍♀️🚫

Radio shows sometimes can feel like the wild west if you are not careful. You as a host have a responsibility to make sure that everyone is respectful with one another and that no hate or interruptions can happen. A few things you can do as host are:

• Decide who comes up as a speaker.
• Bring down to the audience anyone who is being disrespectful
• You can mute anyone who is either passed their time of speaking, derailed the conversation or is being disrespectful
• Choose someone you trust to be moderator and help you manage the speakers and the audience while you are hosting
• If things get too far, you can always remove someone from the radio completely

You can do all these actions by tapping on their profile picture>Manage>select an option

Being a Good Host 101🧡

A recap and extra points:

• Allow creators to come up and interact with you. Reserve the right to allow bullies and trolls to speak.
• Be kind and respectful
• Take time to explain the rules of the radio to your audience so they understand the expectations from the start. If they only have a few minutes to respond, let them know. If they have all the time to speak, let them know. It’s your radio, you choose how you want it to run, just vocalize the rules.
• You don’t have to carry all the responsibility. Have moderators help you out with the technical side of things.
• Be creative and come up with ways to keep your audience engaged.
• Understand and allow different opinions and perspectives, as long as they are respectful.
• Create a safe environment so everyone can express themselves without judgement.
• Finally, just have fun with it!

For more radio tutorials go to @ClapperAcademy!