SocialBook Review: Can It Replace VidIQ for YouTube SEO?

What Is SocialBook and What Do You Get?

SocialBook is a Chrome extension that landed on AppSumo as a lifetime deal, promising to help YouTube creators optimize their channels. At its core, it overlays analytics and optimization tools directly into the YouTube interface, similar to what VidIQ and TubeBuddy already do.

The AppSumo deal starts at $49 for a single YouTube channel. Stack a second code and you unlock five channels, three codes gets you 15, and at four codes you hit unlimited channels. Along the way, you also scale up competitor tracking slots, trending alerts, and tag list presets. Each tier adds 10 more competitor slots and proportionally more alert and tag list capacity until the unlimited tier opens everything up.

Competitor tracking lets you monitor rival channels and get email notifications when their videos hit a certain view-per-hour threshold. Tag lists let you save and reuse groups of tags across uploads. On paper, the feature set is solid for a YouTube optimization tool at this price point.

The SocialBook Dashboard and Profile Analytics

Once you set up SocialBook, you get access to a web-based dashboard with a Social Blade-style channel profile. It shows your estimated earnings, influence score (rated 0–100), total followers, view counts, video count, and last active date. The design is clean and visually appealing.

However, the accuracy of the data raised some red flags. The estimated cost-per-thousand-views and suggested pricing for sponsored content didn't line up with actual YouTube Studio numbers. Even more concerning, some of the graphs on my profile were pulling in data from a completely different channel — a creator with 4 billion views was showing up on my analytics page. Once you scroll past those graphs, the data does switch back to your own channel, but it's not a confidence-inspiring experience.

Most of the demographic data — audience gender, location, interests — is already available through YouTube Studio's built-in analytics. SocialBook's version of this data wasn't entirely accurate either, with country percentages that didn't match YouTube's own reporting.

Brand Mentions: One Genuinely Useful Feature

Buried in the profile analytics, there's one feature that actually stands out: brand mention tracking. SocialBook scans your videos and identifies any brands you've mentioned — companies like Yelp, HBO, Hulu, or Logitech, for example.

This is genuinely interesting because it's not something YouTube Studio offers natively. If you had a video mentioning a major brand that went viral, you could use this data to reach out and start a sponsorship conversation. It's the kind of insight that could pay for the tool by itself if you're actively pursuing brand deals. Unfortunately, it's a small bright spot in an otherwise inconsistent analytics experience.

Chrome Extension: How SocialBook Works on YouTube

The Chrome extension adds an icon in your browser toolbar with quick shortcuts to your dashboard, videos, trend alerts, and keyword explorer. On any YouTube video, it overlays channel-level analytics including average views, subscriber conversion rate, like percentage, and comment rate. You can compare a specific video's performance against the channel's averages at a glance, which is genuinely helpful for sizing up competitors.

There's also a SocialBook button next to the subscribe button on any channel. Clicking it shows the channel's category, top tags, and top-performing videos. But if you try to dig deeper into a competitor's full profile, everything beyond the basics is locked behind an upgrade wall — and clicking that upgrade button opens a Zoom booking interface rather than an actual upgrade page. Whether that's a bug or a limitation of the AppSumo deal, it's a strange experience either way.

More troubling is a functional bug I discovered during video uploads. With SocialBook's Chrome extension enabled, tags entered in YouTube Studio's upload interface would visually disappear after pressing enter. They were still technically there (hovering revealed tooltips), but you couldn't see them. Disabling the extension immediately fixed the problem. For a tool that's supposed to help with YouTube optimization, breaking the tag input field is a significant issue.

Competitor Tracking and Trend Alerts

SocialBook's competitor tracking feature lets you add channels you want to monitor. It suggests competitors based on your content, though the recommendations weren't particularly accurate — my channel got suggestions like Template Monster and Copywriting Course, which aren't really in the same space. You can manually search and add competitors, though keyword-based searching was unreliable and I encountered a 403 error on my first attempt to add one.

Once competitors are added, you get a comparison dashboard showing subscriber counts, view totals, videos per day, and engagement metrics over selectable time frames (7 days, 30 days, etc.). The video analysis section lets you compare likes, dislikes, comments, and views side by side. It's a straightforward way to benchmark your channel, though much of this data is available through other free tools.

Trend alerts are more interesting. You can set up keyword-based monitoring so that if a competitor publishes a video mentioning a specific term and it hits a view-per-hour threshold, you get an email. This could help you react quickly to trending topics in your niche, which is a genuinely useful capability for active creators.

Keyword Explorer and Tag Management

The keyword explorer lets you search for terms and see their search volume, competition level, interest over time, and related queries. For popular terms like "hello neighbor," you get rich data including relevant tags you can save directly to a tag list, related trending videos, and up to 25 related keywords.

For smaller niches, the data can be sparse. An AppSumo search returned results but with fewer related tags and trending videos. The related queries are displayed five at a time, which means a lot of clicking through pages.

Tag management works as a simple preset system — you create named lists, add tags, and copy-paste them when uploading videos. It's functional but more tedious than VidIQ's approach, where you can view and copy the tags from any existing video with a single click. That workflow of finding a relevant, well-performing video and borrowing its tag strategy is faster and more practical than maintaining preset lists manually.

Thumbnail Builder and Background Removal

SocialBook includes a thumbnail creation tool accessible from YouTube Studio. You can capture specific frames from your video using a timeline scrubber, then add elements like stickers, text with Google Fonts, or use pre-built templates as starting points. The template selection includes some solid designs you can customize with your own images and text.

The background removal feature, both in the thumbnail editor and on the SocialBook website, was underwhelming. Extracting a person from a photo worked reasonably well only when the subject's face was clearly visible and the background had good contrast. In several tests, the tool either failed completely (deleting the entire image) or produced noticeable artifacts like green screen bleed in hair. The output quality was also noticeably lower resolution than the original upload.

The cartoonizer feature converts your photo into a cartoon version of yourself. The results were more usable than the background removal, but still required additional editing. These creative tools feel like nice-to-haves rather than reliable production tools.

How VidIQ's Free Plan Compares

For context, VidIQ's completely free plan already covers many of the same use cases. On any YouTube video, VidIQ shows views per hour, an optimization checklist (flagging issues like insufficient tags), and — critically — the actual tags used on that video. You can copy those tags with a single click and paste them into your own upload, which is a workflow that demonstrably works for ranking in suggested videos.

VidIQ also enhances YouTube search results with keyword volume and competition data displayed right in the interface. You don't need to leave YouTube to visit a separate keyword explorer. When you click into a video from search results, all the analytics data loads immediately alongside the video. This seamless integration into the YouTube experience is what makes VidIQ feel like a more mature tool.

The key advantage VidIQ holds is that its most useful features — tag visibility, one-click tag copying, and in-search analytics — are available on the free plan. You're comparing a $0 tool against a $49+ lifetime deal, and the free option currently delivers a better core experience.

Final Verdict: A 6.3 and a Pass for Now

SocialBook earns a 6.3 out of 10. There are some genuinely interesting features here — brand mention tracking, trend alerts, and the competitor monitoring system all have real potential. The thumbnail builder is a decent bonus, and the overall design of the dashboard is polished.

But the shortcomings are hard to overlook. Inaccurate analytics data, a Chrome extension bug that breaks YouTube's tag input, locked competitor profiles behind an unclear upgrade path, and creative tools that aren't quite reliable enough for production use. When free tools like VidIQ already deliver a smoother, more functional experience for the core task of YouTube SEO optimization, it's a tough sell at any price.

This doesn't mean SocialBook can't improve — it clearly has ambition and a broad feature set. But right now, with too many rough edges and strong free competition, this one is a pass. If you're already using VidIQ or TubeBuddy and happy with them, there's no compelling reason to switch.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.