Taylor Swift Eras Tour helped Gillette Stadium reshape social strategy

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.