How Taylor Swift helped Gillette Stadium reshape its social strategy

Taylor Swift’s sprawling Eras Tour has consistently been one of the buzziest online topics since it kicked off back in March. On TikTok, the hashtag #ErasTour has racked up over 13 billion views, and the international event has spawned an outpouring of social media content. Fans have taken to social media to share their elaborate Eras Tour outfits and react to (or methodically document) the “surprise songs” that Swift performs at each concert. So, when the Eras Tour came to Gillette Stadium in mid-May, Kassie Epstein, manager of business development and external affairs for Kraft Sports + Entertainment—which oversees marketing and events management for the stadium—knew she had to leverage the rush of attention that Gillette Stadium’s social media accounts would be receiving. “That week leading up to her concerts was massive for us on social media—more than any Super Bowl,” said Epstein, who manages Gillette Stadium’s social media strategy and is the stadium’s self-proclaimed “social media girl” on Twitter. “On Monday of that week, when we kicked off our Eras Tour content, my perspective was that we were, in theory, hosting the biggest event in the world on our property,” she added. “We knew going in that it was a chance to capitalize—not monetarily, but on our social media standing and reaching a new group of followers. It was like, ‘Let’s do whatever we can to maximize having all eyes on us for seven days.’” @gillettestadium she said it, not us 😎 #gillettestadium #swifttok #taylorswift #foxboroughtstheerastour #tstheerastour ♬ original sound - gillettestadium Ad Age Breakout Brand Leaders New award honors the people behind emerging brands Enter here Epstein’s social strategy surrounding Swift’s Eras Tour epitomizes her year-round approach to engaging with fans of both the artists holding concerts at Gillette Stadium and of local sports teams such as the New England Patriots, for whom the stadium is their home turf. As one member of a two-person social media team, Epstein spends much of her time scouring social platforms for conversations around these upcoming events and jumping into them and contributing to the hype—though, typically less intensively than she did for the Eras Tour. Gillette Stadium’s social media presence “was a random thing that I started 10 years ago at this point, when Facebook and Instagram wasn't what it’s like today for businesses,” she said. “I was like, ‘Maybe we should just create a page and who knows, maybe it’ll be a way for us to reach fans.’ I was thinking it was going to be like just this little afterthought. But it’s obviously snowballed, and social media has become a much bigger part of my role—the main part of it.” This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity. How do you and your team create social content? Is it planned out far ahead of time or more reactionary? It’s a mix of both. I’ve never been really big on scheduling content ahead of time. And especially in sports and entertainment, things pop up so often and news breaks and you never want to accidentally forget about content scheduled to go up when hard-hitting news comes out, like there’s a trade or someone was cut from the team. So, I think a lot of our strategy is knowing there’s some core thing we want to make sure we’re covering, but then also leaving a ton of room for things that pop up in the moment that I think fans really resonate with when you can react in real time. For us, our biggest platforms are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Twitter, I love, because it’s all about live communication and conversation. So when fans have questions or comments, we can really engage with them in real-time—for concerts or for football season. With concerts, a lot of these fans coming to Gillette have never been here, so a lot of what we try to do on socials is do as best we can to provide education ahead of time, like “This is where my seat is. I know where I’m entering from.” We don’t want fans to get here and be confused and overwhelmed. In between that, it’s about having just fun content that the fans of these artists would want. They want that kind of back-and-forth from the venue, and building hype around the show and getting excited about it. We're never trying to communicate the same way to all of our fans—people are coming to Gillette to see everyone from the Patriots to Taylor Swift, to Kenny Chesney and Beyoncé. It's always a kind of different communication style, depending on the community you’re engaging with. People are always asking me, “No offense, but why would someone follow a building on social media?” And it makes sense, right? We’re not an athlete; we’re not an artist. But I think that question is kind of a guide for our strategy: what we post has to be something they can’t get anywhere else. So, that’s going to be behind-the-scenes content or giveaways only we can provide—like the Taylor Swift “13” jersey we gave away. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Gillette Stadium (@gillettestadium) How do you decide where to engage and what trends to lean into? A lot of it is just scrolling and doing a lot of organic community listening that way. We also have a pretty robust analytics team that can pull together reports on a pretty consistent basis and be like, “Hey, here's something that we noticed.” It can be data comparing our building to other NFL buildings, or our building to other venues in New England or in the entire U.S. And for me, I always have two screens open and TweetDeck up at all times, just like scrolling through and seeing what people are talking about. It’s probably not healthy, but it just has become that way for me. Obviously, there's only so much we can do with so many comments coming in, but we're constantly trying to reply and engage with as many fans as possible. I think they want to be seen and heard and have it not just feel like we're disseminating press releases. They want it to be more of a conversation, which is always what we're trying to do. Lindsey [Cunniff], my other team member, manages our TikTok account completely on her own. She’ll come into my office and be like, “Here’s something that’s trending. I know this is gonna perform really well, and here's what I've put together. Does it look okay to you?” And half of the time I’m like, “Listen, I trust you. I’m not even fully understanding what’s trending on TikTok right now.” She did such a great job the whole week of the Eras Tour of monitoring what was going on on TikTok and finding ways to push out information while still being fun. With the Eras Tour, specifically, we’re lucky that we’ve had Taylor Swift concerts here since 2010 and we have a pretty good understanding of her fan base and what communication style they respond well to. I think these fans really follow her tour like you would a sports team—even if they’re not going to the shows, they’re online trying to figure out what the surprise songs for the night are or what outfits she wore. So we tried our best with engaging them that way—we made friendship bracelets and exchanged them with fans, we took videos of different fans’ outfits. It's not just about the stadium and the artists coming here—we want to make sure fans feel seen and as much a part of this content as the artists are. @gillettestadium had so much trading bracelets with swifties tonight! here we go night two 🥳 #gillettestadium #swifttok #tstheerastour #taylorswift #foxboroughtstheerastour ♬ original sound - The hoppers What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken on social media? I’d say our decision to go really all-in on Taylor 13 years ago. Building a community with fan engagement and social media replies was a bit of a risk at the time, and there was always the risk that we’d turn off our core follower base—which, at the time, was mostly football and soccer fans—by going in on a specific artist. But we made the decision early on to really lean into the Swifties and that community of fans and, while most stadiums are doing similar things this year, it was certainly more of a risk in 2010. This year we decided to lean all the way in. We changed our name on social media to “Gil13tte Stadium (Taylor’s Version)” to highlight the 13 shows she’s played here, which is also her favorite number; switched our bios to a Taylor Swift-specific description; and switched over all our Instagram highlights to spell her last name. It’s always a risk to really dive all-in on one act for an account with followers with such a wide scope of interests. Some fans follow us for football, some for soccer, some for country music or heavy metal, some for motorsports. But we felt it really paid off. The fans loved it and appreciated that their favorite stadium was really celebrating their favorite artist. Ad Age Leading National Advertisers 2023 Ad spending, rankings and analysis for the biggest marketers and brands Enter here What is the biggest way the social media lead role has shifted in the last few years? Social media is one of those industries where things are just always changing. I’ve been doing it for a billion years and I still don’t have all of the answers. So, you can’t get complacent; you always have to figure out how you can pivot your strategy. In the past, I’d reach out to touring artists and be like, “Hey, for social media content, do you have any preferred images or copy that you’d want us to use?” And in those early years, they’d be like, “Oh, I don’t know. Just do whatever you want.” But now social media is so much a part of these artists and how they market their brand. We’ll have some tours that are so specific about everything, down to the emoji that we use in the post, and be like, “Here’s our three-page guide on social content.” That’s definitely been a journey, for sure. Another big shift for us in recent years has been music licensing. We can’t post music anymore, period, unless we have the approval of not just the artist, but every single person or entity with ownership of the music. I mean, there could literally be 50 different groups. It’s been incredibly hard for us as a venue promoting music to shift our strategy—like, how do you cover an event about music without including music? We've tried to figure out ways in which we can kind of pivot and use different content without music and make that work. Influencers have played a big part in that over the past two years, for us. We’re able to partner with them and have them disseminate content and post the actual music from these concerts. They can kind of push out this content that we can't from our actual brand channel. How does your team find creators to work with? Last summer was the first time that we actually activated our influencer strategy. We have one of our luxury suites open at the stadium for all of our concerts, and we invite influencers to come on the property and get free access. We leave any content requirements very loose—influencer content works best when it’s organic. We’ve narrowed in on hyper-local influencers in the Boston area. It doesn't help us to have an influencer with a half a million followers who’s based in LA. I’d rather have someone with 20,000 followers who's from Boston and their content fits into that “New England niche.” I think our followers appreciate that—knowing the influencer is someone that could be them or someone they’d see on the street. To find them, it really is mostly Lindsey and I scrolling through Instagram and TikTok or Twitter. You always obviously want to look through everyone's content to make sure they’re someone who's going to be a fit with our brand and makes sense to be participating in our content. When we see someone on our social media who lives in the city or is from New England, we’ll reach out, because other people who live in this area might kind of organically know them on some level or feel like they trust them. It has that integrity of like, “Yes, this is someone from Boston. This isn’t someone from Texas who just got flown out here for the concert.” That authenticity is really important for us.

How Taylor Swift helped Gillette Stadium reshape its social strategy

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