The Taylor Swift Effect: How these brands went platinum on social
Taylor Swift is the music industry’s most prolific singer-songwriter and pop star. Everything she touches seems to go to number one on the charts, and the superstar’s ongoing Eras Tour brings hundreds of millions of dollars to each city she performs in.
The boost from the Eras Tour isn’t just in ticket sales, either. Whether she’s photographed dining at a particular establishment, wearing an article of clothing, or visiting the Melbourne Zoo — where Swift’s Eras Tour goes, economic impact follows.
As social ROI pioneers, we decided to measure Swift’s impact on how brands are discussed on social media. We used our social listening tools to track the “Taylor Swift Effect” in real time, revealing how these impressive boosts from her devoted fans can transform niche businesses into booming hot spots.
Let’s pull back the curtain and examine how Taylor Swift and her Swifties can impact brand value, sentiment, awareness, and social ROI.
Key terms
- Results refers to the number of individual social media posts that mention a specific keyword. It’s not a measure of how many times a keyword was used (e.g., a post that mentions “Taylor” 5 times is still equal to 1 result).
- Social media ROI measures the value your business gets from the time, money, and effort you put into social media marketing. It shows if your efforts are helping you reach goals like making sales, growing engagement, or building your brand. Social ROI can be calculated using Hootsuite’s free tool.
- In social listening, sentiment measures how many positive or negative keywords appear along a specific search term. The search terms we used for this analysis were Taylor Swift, Taylor, Super Bowl, NFL, Little Lies, FAZIT, Gitter Freckles, Green Velvet Dress, and Usher.
- Net sentiment is the difference between positive and negative sentiment. For example, if 50% of posts on a topic are positive and 75% are negative, the net sentiment is -25%. A negative net sentiment score indicates that negative sentiment outweighs positive sentiment.
How brands went from 0 to 100 in only a Fortnight
Taylor Swift’s keen eye for style sent some brands soaring in record time. Take the green velvet dress from Little Lies that Swift was photographed in last January.
Overnight, not only did the small Scotland-based boutique gain 400+ results on social media, but social conversations about Taylor’s “green velvet dresses” exploded.
(“Results” here refer to individual posts mentioning a specific keyword. Five posts mentioning Taylor’s dress equal five results, while a single post mentioning Taylor’s dress 10 times equals just one result.)
The spike was almost immediate. The eagle-eyed Swift fandom — and social media accounts devoted to tracking every outfit she has ever been photographed in — sparked a surge in online comments about the Little Lies dress, driving searches and social activity as fans rushed to track down the dress.
“The viral nature of the story meant that our site and socials were linked to from so many well-known and high-profile news sites, blogs, and social media accounts — backlinks that are like gold dust!” said a representative from Little Lies.
“It meant that with more traffic and more eyes on our content, we saw a steady increase in engagement — particularly on posts about the Taylor Swift moment.”
In fact, Little Lies’ owner, Jade Robinson, told The Times that this particular dress sold out almost instantly after Taylor was spotted wearing it. Even two months later, social activity for the dress remained 6900% above the brand’s pre-Taylor numbers.
The impact didn’t stop at sales. Little Lies noted that the Taylor Swift Effect also allowed them to refine their social media strategy.
“What the Taylor Swift Effect has done is given us the luxury of taking some time to really tell our story,” the brand explained. “We had the influx of sales, which gave us a little cashflow cushion, meaning our social media didn’t have to be so ‘sales’ focused.”
“We slowed down and really spoke to our followers about our core values as a brand, as well as the journey of our product development — this, in turn, has resulted in a more engaged audience. People want a story, they don’t want to be sold to.”
Of course, it would take a psychic to know what brand Taylor Swift is about to wear next — but that’s where Hootsuite Social Listening can come in handy.
Think your brand may be Taylor’s next choice? Tracking the number of mentions of your brand (and its related keywords) can give you a heads-up that a site-crashing influx of traffic may be coming your way.
That’s exactly what happened to Fazit after Taylor Swift wore their signature glitter freckles to a Kansas City Chiefs game this past autumn.
Social media results for “Fazit,” “glitter freckles,” and “Taylor Swift freckles” shot up to 9,000 results in a single day after sleuthing Swifties uncovered the brand that made Taylor’s freckles.
Within hours, Fazit told WWD that the New Heights of traffic to their website peaked with a 1,000% increase in new visitors.
And just like with Little Lies, even after the initial spike died down, social activity for Fazit’s product stayed way up — a whopping 10,800% higher than before Taylor was seen sporting the freckles.
Super Bowl 2024: A new audience for the Last Great American Dynasty
The Taylor Swift Effect isn’t limited to increased brand awareness and sales. For some brands, having Taylor’s endorsement can help them broaden their appeal to new audiences and demographics. (Even if your name rhymes with Latty Pealy.)
Of course, we couldn’t talk about the Taylor Swift Effect without mentioning her connection to the NFL — through her boyfriend, Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs.
This connection is responsible for one of Taylor Swift’s biggest feats: getting hordes of young women to tune into the NFL every Sunday for the last two years. When the Chiefs made it to the Super Bowl in 2024, Swifties followed.
Even though Swift was only on screen for less than one minute at the 2024 Super Bowl, it became the most-watched Super Bowl of all time, with 123 million viewers tuning in.
And if you compare social media chatter for just the Super Bowl versus Taylor Swift AND the Super Bowl, the results are clear: about 20% of all posts about the game can be attributed to Swift’s legion of Swifties tuning in to see “The Alchemy” play out in real life.
In fact, even with Swift’s limited screen time, she earned 150,00 more social media results than Usher did for his 15-minute-long halftime show:
Breaking down the social conversation by demographic, over 57% of all Taylor Swift and Super Bowl posts came from women, most under the age of 30.
Even NFL viewership shows this, with 9% more women tuning into the game in 2024 than in 2023.
And with Taylor streaming Chiefs’ games live during her Eras Tour preshows, we can only expect this number to further increase in 2025.
Social ROI: What’s it like to brag about raking in dollars?
When it comes to viral social media trends, the burning question on many minds is if the buzz is actually bankable. Curious about the hypothetical ROI you could see if Taylor Swift pops up wearing or using your product? Our free social media calculator can show you.
Let’s say Taylor Swift is spotted with your product, and the following day, you receive 13,000 visits to your Facebook page. Of those 13,000 social visits, 13% of people actually make it to your website. From there, 13% of those website visitors actually make a purchase, with an average order value of $130.
Let’s assume you didn’t actually pay Taylor to endorse your product and have no idea how she found out about your brand. That means your costs associated with The Taylor Effect are essentially zero*.
Your ROI from The Taylor Swift Effect is $28,561.
Go ahead and play around with the numbers yourself using our free Social Media ROI Calculator (Taylor’s Version 
)!
Of course, if you’re actively working with influencers in a more typical fashion, you will have costs associated, so this calculator will be even more helpful.
Once you do manage to get Taylor Swift to notice your brand, all you have to do is make sure you have the inventory to fulfill the influx of orders.
*We’re assuming $0 costs for this specific campaign. Obviously, you’d have to have some form of marketing for Taylor Swift to notice your product in the first place, so your real-life spend would be more than $0.
Your brand and Taylor Swift: A Love Story?
We’ll admit that a personal collaboration with Taylor Swift might be on a level most businesses can’t access.
While certain large brands, like Apple and Capital One, can work with her to create influence for their brands and products, most companies can only hope that their product sales are indirectly influenced by Taylor Swift.
But that’s not to say that your brand can’t harness the power of Taylor Swift fans, pop culture, other relevant fan bases, and influencers within your own niche to increase your brand awareness on social media.
Take this Instagram post by Stats Canada, which uses Taylor Swift references to present relevant data in a fun and engaging way. Content like this is respectful and fun for Swifties, and the comments prove it!
Our best advice to you? If you’re lucky enough to capture Swift’s attention, you can bet that her fans will follow. Creating purposeful content that actually understands Swifties and Taylor is the key to success.
And if you really want to get ahead, have your resident Swiftie (we know you have one) help you when crafting Taylor Swift-inspired marketing content.
Editor’s note: There are absolutely no Easter eggs about Reputation TV within this blog post.
Ready to get into social listening? With Hootsuite, you have brand mentions, trending topics, and sentiment info at your fingertips. Start enhancing your social strategy with the insights that matter today.
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