Spotify Social Media Audit

By: Kate Wroblewski

Spotify is one of my favorite platforms out there at the moment. When talking about music streaming platforms, there has always been a bit of a competition between Apple Music and Spotify. That being said, most of my friends, and a huge chunk of the world have chosen Spotify. I think this is mainly due to the ability to stream on devices other than those in the Apple ecosystem, and for the ability to make fun of friends for their odd tastes in music, or praise them for a great song they found deep in the stream. I chose Spotify because I feel like they have done a really great job at engaging their audience. Music is a very personal thing to everyone involved, and Spotify is always on top of creating specific playlists for every different person subscribed to them. I also love how you can see what other people are listening to on Spotify. It makes it so you can engage with friends, and even look at the playlists they are listening to and discover new music from there.

Spotify is also really great at showing their presence on social media platforms. They post everyday on Instagram either showing either the charts for that day, artists who have singles coming out with the album art, or even if something big happens in music history. For example they posted a tribute to the band Daft Punk when they announced the end of their career last week.
Spotify even works to engage integration of social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Those choices or preferences in music selection may be taken as suggestions or recommendations to our friends on these platforms. These actions, without knowing can inspire our friends, and the music listening habits that happen later in both of our lives. Also on Twitter, Spotify works on posting about music news and updates in the industry. They also have a customer support account named @SpotifyCares which helps customers with any trouble they are having with the app.

When discussing what the brands voice is, I feel like it can be different for every user on the app. Spotify works to have the organizations voice be whatever you want it to be. Music is so personal and customizable and Spotify brands itself off of that. Basically, Spotify can be whatever you want it to be.
They like to be known as a brand that is all for you, and can be whatever you want.

With how often Spotify posts, it depends on what platform you are talking about. On the actual platform they post personalized content every Monday, with the Discover Weekly feature, and Friday with the Release Radar playlist. Both of these playlists take the music that you listen to and find songs you may like, or artists that are releasing music that you might be interested in. Discover Weekly is posted on Monday early in the morning, while Release Radar is posted Thursday at 11 PM. This is because that is usually the time when artists release their new music for that week. If talking about how many times they post on social media like Instagram or Twitter, it can be up to 1 to 10 times a day, maybe even more, depending if you count the Instagram stories in a posting aspect. Spotify likes to post on their actual Instagram for big music news, but keep their followers updated through the Instagram Story feature all day long.

I have not heard of Spotify having many contests in the past, but when doing research I found an interesting one they have going on. Their contest is called the playlist exchange contest. Staff at Spotify picks out 8 playlists from all the submissions and then the Spotify community picks the final winner. The last person who won this competition got a pair of urban ears headphones, a month of Spotify premium, and a Spotify t-shirt. This is a great idea to engage customers that are already making these playlists, and engaging the community in listening to these different playlists as well. It is also very smart to reward them with a Spotify t-shirt because it is basically free advertising for their brand.

I think the biggest way Spotify engages fans is with their Spotify Wrapped.
Spotify Wrapped is a personalized experience which entails the company’s popular year-end review of users’ favorite artists, songs, genres and podcasts.
When Spotify Wrapped roundups have come out, everyone starts buzzing about what songs they listened to most, who their top artists were, and how they stacked up in terms of branching out in their taste during the year of 2020. When this comes out every year, almost everyone loves to post their top 10 songs and Artist of the Year on their Instagram stories. The day the wrapped comes out, do not expect to see any content but Spotify on your Instagram. This also upsets Apple Music users that they are not able to share this feature, and it maybe gets some of them to switch so they can post about it next year. Spotify also made the amazing decision to condense this information into Story-sized bites that are easy to share on your social media, which boosts engagement with the app even more.

Lastly, I could not find any accounts of when Spotify had an offensive or “bad” post on social media. This is probably because they are a music streaming site, and only post music related content on their different social media platforms. It is kind of hard to be problematic when you are only posting about the most recent songs released, and music trends at the time. Overall, I think Spotify is a brand that will be around for awhile, and continues to impress their customers on all differing platforms.