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Taylor Swift is officially the most searched person on Google — crushing Lionel Messi by 2.6 million searches during the month of September 2023.
What's fueling the recent Swiftie Surge? Sure, it's a combination of Swift's upcoming Era Tours Concert film and her attendance at a Kansas City Chiefs game with Travis Kelce's mom.
But it’s the pop icon's extraordinary use of social media throughout her career that has really stoked her popularity.
She listens to her audience and responds with encouragement for fans who are struggling emotionally. It's evident from her posts that she is responsible for her content, and her fans know that it’s really Taylor Swift engaging with them — not an agency intern getting paid to keep her accounts active.
When someone as busy as Taylor Swift takes time to respond, she validates every fan's feelings.
Swift is ushering in Social Media 3.0 and every serious content creator on the planet will be forced to "Be Like Taylor."
Let's talk about it.
Social 1.0
In the early days of Social 1.0, content creators were learning how to engage directly with their fans.
A few entrepreneurs like HootSuite and Buffer came along and made it easier for content creators to engage across numerous platforms, batch schedule posts, and see analytics.
We were all reacting to what was already happening with social — as in "everybody else is engaging on social. I've got to get in the game, too!"
Social 2.0
We are currently in the Social 2.0 phase.
Social 2.0 makes advanced analytics available. We have access to machine learning and all sorts of metadata about followers.
This gives creators the information they need to know what resonates with their fans so they can communicate effectively — which creates demand for products and services and ad revenue.
Additionally, the bot. Mostly a negative term around here, but good use of automation and bots can create both efficiency and improved user experiences on booths ides of the table, creator and fan (if not abused!).
Social 3.0
We're still trying to figure out the next phase, but Taylor Swift's model of fan engagement — even when she's not selling anything — is showing the way.
The problem is that not every creator is Taylor Swift. It takes a special talent to engage in an often toxic social media environment and across multiple platforms.
So new tools — like FIVE — are emerging.
We're creating a platform that helps content creators leverage their time with fan engagement. Internally, we call it "multiplying yourself”. If we can help creators engage with the right fans at the right time and do it 10x more efficiently, creators are seeing a mega boost.
We're baking in the ability to view all your accounts from the same dashboard (currently Instagram only but that will change soon).. You're able to see metrics like who your top fans are based on engagement and filter through comments by “classification” including: high quality questions, compliments, thank you’s, and our favorite “purchase intent” when we detect and eager fan looking to purchase a product or service from you. Not to mention, we filter out all of the low-quality engagement, bots and spam so you can just focus on your most valuable audience cohort.
Advance tickets for Taylor Swift's Eras Tour film have already topped $100 million. That's a film!
And according to Pollstar, each of her concerts generates $13 million. The math isn't hard to do. With 146 concert dates, the tour total will come close to $2 billion.
Until Taylor, no artist or group had ever brought in $1 billion.
Beyonce knows to follow Swift's lead, and she's planning a theater release in early December.
At FIVE, we're building a platform that helps superstars engage directly with their fans in much the same way as megastars like Swift and Beyonce — making $1 billion in revenue an attainable goal.
In the superstar business - hop onboard today with a free trial here 👉 www.five.me