As a YouTuber you know that tagging your videos helps your videos get found because at least until YouTube perfects their AI they still doesn’t know exactly what your video is about without you telling them. The same goes for your Instagram pictures, without the #sunset hashtag how would sunset lovers find pictures to look at! (Disclaimer: I love sunset pictures!)

Why are we writing a blog post about this since you all already know tags? Well it’s because today we are announcing tag & location support on Social Blade! What this means is you, as a creator, will be able to go into your settings on Social Blade and add tags to describe your YouTube channel (or you Instagram profile, Twitter account, Twitch channel), and then those tags can be used so you can look up channels that also make content like yours! So say you’re an unboxing channel. You’ll be able to look at a glance and see all the other big unboxing channels and see quickly how your niche is doing, see how the big guys do things, and also who to reach out to for collaborations.

The other thing this is really useful for is remember Social Blade isn’t just used by creators, but its also used widely by brands looking to do brand deals with creators. If you accurately tag your channel then brands can run a report to see all the channels that do certain things. For example, if you review tech products and tag your channel as tech and tech reviews, then a company with a new product looking for tech creators can run a report on tech channels and then reach out to you to see if you want to review it for them! Easier for the brand to find creators, and more brand deals for you means more money in your pocket!

If you were paying attention I mentioned not only were tags new, but also location. What the location system is useful for is for a couple of things. As a creator you can use it to look up what other channels are based in your area to possibly meet up with to talk shop and collaborate. One thing we’re often contacted about is companies hosting events wanting to find creators in their area to speak at their event, this will solve that problem too! When putting in your location we suggest if you live in a small town not necessarily putting your exact town in for privacy reasons, but the closest city.

When you’re tagging your channel we recommend putting in at least 3 tags but probably 5-15 that accurately summarize what your content is about. Ultra specific tags won’t help because if others aren’t using it too you won’t match anyone, but as many general yet accurate tags as you can use that you think other people would search for is the best. A couple of examples of good tags would be: vlog, family, unboxing, minecraft, makeup. A bad one would be: best minecraft player.

So yeah, that’s about it other then how exactly to use it!

In order to tag your channel you’ll need to authenticate it first so we make sure you’re not adding weird tags to PewDiePie or something unless you really are Felix. In order to do this you’ll first need an account on our system (which is free!) and then you simply click the “Auth” link at the top header on our website. On the auth page you can link in all your YouTube, Twitter, Instagram and Twitch channels and then under the “View Authenticated Members” section you can set a location and tag the channels to your hearts content. It should be noted that if your channel is managed by several people everyone can authenticate it with their own dashboard account and everyone will have access to manage the tags on it.

Prior to launching the system we did pre-populate the tags on many of the top channels so your channel may already start off with some tags but feel free to adjust them however you see fit!

If you are on the industry side of things, looking for channels to reach out to for brand deals, speaking gigs, or whatever, head over to our reports section where you’ll be able to plug in tags and locations to find the channels that fit those criteria. Just know that this system is just launching today so if you do run reports now you may want to run them again in a month or so after people have had time to add more tags and locations.

On behalf of the whole team here at Social Blade I truly hope you find this useful. This is something that I had been wanting to implement for a long time and am happy to finally let you guys at it. If you’re going to be at VidCon this week please stop by our booth and say hi as we love meeting you all and we’ll be happy to answer any questions you may have as well!

tl;dr Social Blade now supports tags that describe what your channel/profile is about as well as your location. It will help you compare yourself to others as well as help brands find people who cover certain topics to reach out to for brand deals or speaking gigs.