Social Blade Assessment – Your Next Tool?
Social media has become an important part of an artist’s career, providing a platform for them to connect with their fans and promote their music. With this rise younow need to track their potential new artists on far more than just streaming services if they want to uncover the next big thing. By analysing social media metrics such as followers, engagement, and reach, you can track their target artists’ growth and identify areas you can help them improve. But with so many social media sites, how can you synthesize your social assessment strategy down to a manageable amount? Well that’s easy… Social Blade assessment.
Social Blade is a platform that provides analytics tools for social media platforms such as YouTube, Twitch, and Instagram. It will allow you to track an artist’s social media metrics and benchmark their performance against industry competitors. This, alongside the artists streaming data, will provide you with a complete picture of the artists across all the relevant DSPs, giving you the best tools to assess whether an artist is worth signing in the first place.
The Pros –
First off, as mentioned Social Blade provides quantitative data on various social media platforms, such as YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, and Twitter. This data includes metrics like subscriber counts, views, engagement rates, and follower growth which can give you a quick overview of an artist’s reach, audience engagement, and potential market appeal. The site also helps identify artists who are gaining traction or going viral on social media platforms. By analyzing trends and patterns, you can spot emerging talents before they hit the mainstream. This can lead to early signings and a competitive edge in discovering artists with significant growth potential.
Lastly, Social Blade provides specific demographic information about an artist’s followers or subscribers. This data can help you gauge an artist’s appeal to specific target audiences and assess their potential for market expansion. Understanding an artist’s audience can inform your marketing strategies, helping you make informed decisions about signing new talent moving forward.
The Cons –
Though Social Blades focus on quantitative data can be seen as an upside, it can be limiting when it comes to assessing an artist’s overall talent and potential. It does not provide insights into an artist’s creativity, songwriting abilities, live performance skills, or their ability to connect with an audience on a deeper level. These aspects are crucial in determining long-term success and artist development. Not to mention the fact that it gives you no information on an artist’s streaming performance! Be sure to use the tool alongside others to get a better picture of an artist.
Another point you should definitely take into account is that the data can be susceptible to manipulation and inaccuracies. Artists can engage in practices like buying fake followers, views, or engagement to inflate their numbers artificially. Relying solely on these metrics may lead independent labels to invest in artists with a manufactured online presence, which may not translate to real-world success. Make sure you are aware whether a creator’s explosive success is legitimate before you move on them
The picture, though incomplete, that Social Blade paints makes it quite a unique weapon in your artist assessment arsenal. When it comes to YouTube, you even have access, though rather vague, to what income a creator is receiving from their content. Many creators have pivoted from making YouTube content to becoming successful recording artists, from KSI to Dodie, so putting time into scouting on the platform is a great way to uncover new talent, and Social Blade assessment provides you with the insight to scout a creator’s growth and current success. Just be sure to know that, like many other scouting and assessment tools, it should be used alongside many others to get its full effects.
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