What If I Told You She’s a Mastermind?
Humble Beginnings
If there’s one thing Taylor Swift knows how to do, if you don’t count writing and singing some of the most popular songs on the charts today, it is using her social media platforms to their full advantage.
Like most millennials who grew up in the digital age, Taylor Swift has had a consistent online presence since her early teenage years.
When she accepted the Breakthrough Artist of the Year Award at the 2007 Country Music Awards, Taylor dedicated her win to her “MySpace people.” At the time, she was just an 18-year-old girl with dreams of making it big in the music industry, and MySpace was the platform she used to get her name out to the masses.
She would strategically use MySpace to share her day-to-day life. Much like today’s YouTube vloggers, she would share memorable and funny anecdotes and use her page to bring her MySpace friends on the road as she toured her debut album. By this time, the self-titled album had sold over a million copies only a year after its initial release. By 2008 she had over 650,000 MySpace friends.
The Evolution of Taylor’s Online Success
Taylor Swift has constantly raised the bar regarding her commercial and social success. Repeatedly outdoing and outperforming her previous career moves. Whether it’s the release (or re-release) of an album or selling out stadiums for her tours, Swift’s career has evolved tremendously from her early country music star days. And as with her career growth, her social media has closely followed.
Today, Taylor Swift is active across most social platforms, with her official TikTok page garnering 18.3 million followers, her Instagram 259 million, her Twitter 92.7 million, and her Facebook page 78 million.
Taylor’s social media presence is unique to her fans and followers because they have had the opportunity to have genuine human interactions with her. Her online presence goes beyond the typical promotional content we see from most artists today. A certain level of trust has been cultivated over time, a crucial part of Swift’s online branding.
Fans know she’s genuinely online, just like the rest of us. Aware of trends and sentiments about her and her music. Opening up the floodgates that invite fans to communicate with her and each other in a safe space where all Swifties can share in the community they have created over the years.
She has not shied away from liking, sharing, and commenting on fans’ posts across platforms. These interactions with fans only encourage them to keep posting about her and her music, hoping to get noticed by her one day. Thus maintaining a constant stream of daily digital content about her going without too much effort on her or her team’s part.
Taylor also has a knack for mentioning, acknowledging, and sometimes participating in current trends around her or her music. On the opening night of her Eras Tour, Taylor Swift acknowledged a popular meme amongst fans about herself centered around her ninth studio album, Evermore, released in 2020. “Oh, I’ve seen it. I’ve seen all of it,” she states before singing Champagne Problems, a fan favorite from that album.
This type of give-and-take social interaction has been a part of Taylor Swift’s marketing method since her second album Fearless.
2008 was the first time she integrated her relationship with her fans into her commercial products. A fun little game of hidden messages began with Fearless’ lyric booklet. Once some fans began deciphering and sharing this code online, others ran to the stores and picked up their copies to decipher her messages. They discovered each song had its unique message, like “I cried while recording this” and “Last summer was magical.”
Easter Eggs All Year Long
This trend of hidden messages in lyrics and images, instagram captions, videos, and even in Taylor’s makeup looks has continued and only increased.
In 2019, Scooter Braun at Big Machine Records bought and sold the master rights to Taylor Swift’s first six albums from her former record label. Swift no longer owned any of the songs she had written and sung in any of those albums and was even instructed by Braun and his team that she would not be allowed to perform songs from those albums in the 2019 VMAs.
Taylor took to social media and wrote candidly on her Tumblr page, explaining the situation to her fans. The response was overwhelming across all platforms, with fans and other artists reaching out in support.
When it was time for Taylor’s first album re-release, she took to Instagram to share the news. In an ode to the first album to have easter eggs hidden for fans, she used scattered capital letters to spell out “APRIL NINTH” the day Fearless (Taylor’s Version) would be released.
As the release day neared, Taylor dropped this Tweet featuring a video with anagrammed words spelling out the names of six never-before-heard “vault” tracks featured in the new version of Fearless.
Fans went wild in anticipation of the album, with tons of engagement with the Tweets and theories on what the songs could be about shared on social media.
Swift’s other albums, Reputation and Lover, got a similar treatment. Reputation’s Look What You Made Me Do music video was littered with easter eggs and references to the many headlines and media stories written throughout the years about her and all of her previous “eras.”
Before the announcement of the Lover album, Taylor released the music video for the song ME! That starts with a vicious snake transforming into a kaleidoscope of butterflies.
Referencing the end of her Reputation era, for which the snake is a significant motif and a few teases to the album’s (unknown to the public at the time) title.
Meet Her at Midnight
On August 28, 2022, Taylor Swift won MTV’s Video Music Award for Video of the Year for the short film music video of her song All Too Well 10-Minute Version (Taylor’s Version)— a full circle moment for those who remember the infamous Kanye incident in 2008.
The win for the 14-minute, 55-second-long music video from the album Red (Taylor’s Version) allowed her the unique opportunity to announce the release of her 10th studio album in October. She then teased more details on her social media that same day at midnight.
The post dropped at 12:00 AM on the dot and revealed Taylor’s new album, Midnights, would feature 13 songs and all be centered around stories of 13 “sleepless nights” from Swift’s life. In the post, Taylor was pictured in a 70s vintage-decorated room with an old school landline in her hand. And thus, the first Midnights easter egg was planted in the second image of the announcement post.
On September 21st, one month before the album's release date, Taylor Swift began her Midnights Mayhem with Me video series. Sitting in that same vintage room.
In her first video for the series, she stated, “I know that I have a habit of dropping cryptic clues and eater eggs when giving you information about my music, but I’m not here to deny that. I am here to defy that,” before using a vintage bingo ball tumbler and an old school landline phone to announce the new track titles.
Both longtime fans who had been used to her hijinks and newer fans began tuning in every day at midnight to watch the videos as they were released and then flooded their social media platforms with theories about the album and music.
An ongoing buzz and conversation centered around Midnights that always carried over into the following day due to each video’s release time.
Taylor’s Unique Marketing Style
What sets Taylor Swift apart from other artists regarding her marketing and promotional material is how personal and interactive it can be. Another excellent example of this is Swift’s commencement speech at NYU, where she was presented with an honorary doctorate of fine arts from the university.
The commencement ceremony occurred in May of 2022, three months before Swift announced her new album and five months before it was released.
In this speech, Taylor made multiple references to the songs and lyrics from the upcoming Midnights album, which fans had been blissfully unaware of at the time of the speech.
With this simple action, Taylor not only created buzz and publicity by making an appearance and speaking at the ceremony but also had fans going back to re-watch said speech to cross-reference her words five months after the fact! Once again, keeping the constant conversation around content about her and her name going for a continuous period.
This was so meticulously planned on her part. But it wasn’t just this speech. More minor and seemingly unimportant (at the time) words and turns of phrases scattered throughout her social media posts and interviews, all signaling toward her upcoming work and her previous endeavors. A tangled web of engagement and, for the most part, free publicity.
Taylor Swift has put metaphorical blood, sweat, and tears into cultivating a community that expects interaction with her branding. Knowing and understanding her target audience is the foundation of her digital marketing strategy.
She is fully aware of what her fans want and what they have learned to expect, and she is more than willing to give it to them for the small price of consuming her content. While there is no telling where Swift’s career will go next, it would be foolish of us to think it could go anywhere else but up.
