Warning! The following contains spoilers for The Voice's "Blind Auditions Part 3." Read at your own risk!
As The Voice coaches continue to build their teams in Season 18, the banter and manipulation grows. Competitors must choose where they'll go next. Blake Shelton really stepped up his game in the third episode, and was doing all he could to undermine Kelly Clarkson and prevent her from capturing her 4th win on the NBC singing competition. In doing that he gave Nick Jonas a big boost by telling a competitor that anyone on the new coach's team is bound to go far thanks to his loyal and massive following.
It's a great compliment to Nick Jonas and his fans, but is it actually true? As someone who does a fair bit of browsing social media during episodes, I can't deny the Nick Jonas fandom is very active on Twitter. There could be some truth to Blake Shelton's words, but some further digging revealed that Jonas isn't the most followed person of the judges on Twitter. In fact, the coach with the most followers by a large margin is actually Shelton.
While it's true that Twitter followers aren't the definitive metric to measure an artist's fandom or success, Blake Shelton is quite a popular guy on Twitter. His 20.5 million followers exceeds Nick Jonas' by a cool 6 million, as Jonas currently sits with 14.5 million. After him the margin between coaches is smaller, with John Legend at 13.3 million, and Kelly Clarkson with 12.3 million. When just looking at these Twitter numbers, it seems like Nick may not have the biggest fandom of the bunch.
With that said, I'd be negligent not to mention Nick possibly has more fans willing to vote for him on The Jonas Brothers' Twitter (4.8 million), or on Joe (10.3 million) and Kevin Jonas' (5.4 million) accounts. He also has a famous cheerleader in his wife Priyanka Chopra, who has a whopping 25.6 million followers on Twitter, and she's been tweeting about the show. I should also mention both Jonas and his wife are forces of nature on Instagram with 79.1 million followers between them, which dwarfs all three other coaches' Instagram followings (20 million) combined. Perhaps Blake Shelton is on to something after all.
Of course, for Blake Shelton to be right with his statement, there would have to be a proven link between coaches' fan followings and wins. Again, social media follows aren't clear cut proof of fanbase sizes, but it should be noted Kelly Clarkson has the lowest numbers of all four judges on both Instagram and Twitter. She has won 3 of the past 4 seasons, and while that's still less than Blake's 6, it may be enough to show that the size of a coach's fanbase isn't everything.
Still, with the massive presence and influence Nick Jonas has across his family on the web, it will be interesting to see how his competitors fare when the audience vote comes into play. If they start advancing regardless of how they performed against another competitor, then we can start speculating on how much of a factor his fans were on Season 18. Until then though, there's not enough data that shows The Voice audience votes just because of who the coach is.
The Voice airs on NBC Mondays at 8:00 p.m. ET. Continue to stick with CinemaBlend for more on the competition, and for the latest news happening in movies and television.
