Keyla M Torres

“You’re Like A Phenomenon! I’m Gonna Hype You Up So Big On TV Right Now.”

– Gwen Stefani

The Voice is one of the first shows to incorporate social media into their live shows. The show has been evolving since it’s premiere to be more social with their audience. After taking a look at an article posted on the Shorty Awards website, they’ve created three goals to create the Social TV experience more meaningful for the audience. They focused on extending storytelling, engaging with the audience, and creating urgency. Extended storytelling is to give people a reason to keep watching every week. Coaches and artists on the show are encouraged to share their experience on social media. This way, they come across as more authentic than contestants or influencers on other competing shows. They also integrated their social media team to keep track of tweets during the live show to appear on trending. The next goal is to engage with the audience. The audience is the main priority. They dedicate 1-2 hours per week for the show. They want to feel involved in the process and have a connection with different contestants. They can do this by posting fan reactions, having singer shout outs, having coach and contestant takeovers, and social media campaigns. The last goal is to create urgency. They should make each episode an event by have people going live on Instagram and TikTok answering questions. This can also be done by coaches and contestants. They can also live stream the entire event for people that don’t have cable. 

The Voice integrates Social more deeply than any show on television by using connection, collaboration and content techniques. The most successful Social TV integration of all time is The Voice Instant Save. It encourages fans to send millions of tweets each season. Each week fans vote for the artists they want to save them from elimination and the results are shown on-air in real time. The Voice also uses their on-air segment, Skybox, to showcase Social by using it for social calls to action, sharing UGC content, backstage videos, and discussing twitter content and much more. They also found ways to interact with fans one-on-one throughout the season by having users tweet at us with a specific hashtag to generate content made just for them. These included #ChairMeUp, with fans using the hashtag received a graphic with their name on the back of a Voice chair. 

Over the years they’ve collaborated with many influencers and creators on multiple social media platforms including Facebook, Bitmoji, Snapchat, Instagram, Tumblr and TikTok. As trends happen, the Voice evolves with what is popular as well. Some content examples they’ve used are #BehindTheVoice, which is a full social experience that brings fans behind the scenes every step of the artists’ journey all season with intimate photography, videos, GIFs and pre-show events. The also used Voice Tailgate, which at the time was the only native-social preshow for a TV show, to showcase original content unfolding exclusively on social platforms. Featured Voice Coaches, artists, influencers, celebrity fans of the show and press as they mingled backstage and shared the experience directly on their handles and The Voice’s accounts. In 2015, The Voice episode on 12/18/15 was the most social reality series episode of 2015. 289,000 people sent 1.4 million tweets about The Voice on that day, and 2.3 million people saw those tweets a total of 15.7 million times. At around the same time, their Facebook, YouTube and Vine had the most likes, subscribers and followers of any other reality series on broadcast and cable.

Since this Shorty Award article was published in 2015, I decided it was necessary to take a look at how the voice is currently marketing their show. They don’t have their own individual website, but you can find information on episodes, casting, news and shopping under the Voice option on the NBC website. It was a lot more beneficial to look at their social media platforms. The Voice Instagram currently has 2.1 million followers with 7,009 posts. They have a mixture of photo and video content. Their page is full of pictures and videos from live performances, videos of singing battles, and promotions from the judges talking about which team is going to win. A cool idea that they could implement is to make backstage takeover videos with the contestants while they practice for their next performance. This can include advice they get from their coach, snip-it’s of them singing, and asking them questions so their fans can get to know them. 

The Voice Facebook has 18,137,752 million followers and 17,134,172 likes on their page. Their Facebook is used for more article-based content with links that either take you to NBC.com or YouTube.com I think this is a good idea for them since younger people aren’t on Facebook as often as Instagram or TikTok. So, they can have links that go to other platforms with the more elaborate content and use the Facebook account to promote it. The Voice twitter account has 5 million followers with tweets averaging about 3-5 tweets daily. Their twitter also contains article-based contents, but most importantly serves as the hub for communication between fans during live shows. THE VOICE’s Twitter account has 1% influence rate which means a tweet on this account can have an average of 36K influence. Their average likes based on their last 100 published tweets is 29.5k and with retweets at 6k. The Voice TikTok account has 3.3 million followers with 49.6 million likes. The Voice YouTube channel has 8.85 million subscribers with a couple thousand videos. 

The Voice mobile app is very innovative and makes being a fan of the show so much fun. You can watch all the episode through the app when it’s airing and votes for your favorite contestants. There’s an option where you can become a coach yourself create your own dream team. You can participate in trivia and polls about the show and contestants. You can even suggest a song that you feel would sound good from one of the artists. I think a cool new element they could add to app would be to have a contest for the app users. They could have the users that have the most accurate teams each season be a guest judge for the next season. This would show that the show cares about the audience watching and connecting with them. This would also cause more people to download the app and more engagement through social media is they came up with a hashtag. With the continuation of constant new music, I don’t see how this show could ever get off trend. I think if they shift to including the audience more into the show, they can have a leg up on competing shows. They can always count on my view weekly as long as they continue to air.