The Swiftie universe is a vibe: Meet Taylor Swift's biggest social media influencers
In bedrooms across the world are the Taylor Swift trendsetters spending their weekend nights glued to their phones, tablets and laptops to watch the Eras Tour. Their lightning-fast fingers are ready to pounce anytime the singer makes a joke, has a flub or stops the digital world with a surprise announcement.
Saturday night, they frantically posted videos of the kiss between Swift and boyfriend Travis Kelce, allowing it to be seen around the world in just seconds. Some of them ask for Venmo donations, others have a Patreon or subscription-based channel, but most do it for their love of the international superstar and the community that she and her following have created. Here are the stories of seven of those influencers.
Andrei, the social media giant
The Goliath of fan accounts is @taylorerastour on Instagram. A whopping 610,000 followers engage on the page. Even Swift’s backup dancers, all four of her backup singers and Gayle, one of the opening acts, follow the account run out of Bucharest, Romania, by 26-year-old Andrei Ciprian.
“It’s an honor for me that they follow me and most of them interact with me,” he said via WhatsApp text. “Gayle is the coolest person I’ve met. We interacted during the tour. Wow! No words! I love her!”
Ciprian spends 2-3 hours a day updating the account. He doesn’t get paid. He just does this out of admiration for the singer.
“I put so much effort to grow the page by interacting with people posting daily, and I want to be a professional fan,” he said. “My favorite album is '1989' and era is 'Reputation.' My favorite songs are: ‘Style,’ ‘Bad Blood,’ ‘…Ready for It?’ and ‘Enchanted.’”
And it’s not the first time he’s built up a social media following of this size. He was the creator of @reputationstadiumtour, racking up a half a million followers and posting all things tour related in 2018 until the account was shut down.
Ironically, while he posts about the tour incessantly, he hasn’t seen Swift’s 3 1/2 hour show in person. He plans to go in Vienna, Austria.
“I wish to meet her,” he said about Swift, “and if I did, I would ask her, ‘How does it feel to become Artist of the Year?’”
Data Swiftie charts the way
Kayla Wong may be a senior public relations manager by day, but in her free time she crunches album sales numbers, codes lyrics into Microsoft Excel and double checks her formulas to share every bit of Swift minutiae.
“I thought if it’s interesting to me, maybe it’s interesting to other people,” said the University of California business school graduate. “‘Lover’ has the most season mentions. ‘Lover’ has the most blue mentions like proportionate to the album. ‘Reputation’ is the highest percentage of food and beverage mentions.”
Hundreds of colorful graphs, charts and statistics are found splashed across her Instagram account @headfirstfearless. So when Swift sings, “But honestly, baby, who’s counting?” in her song “So It Goes…,” the answer is Wong.
“I was 13 when I became a Swiftie, and now I am 28,” Wong said. “Those years in particular are very uncertain years of somebody’s life. I really think that I would be a completely different person if I didn’t have her music through every step of that.”
Autumn, a tour de force
Twenty minutes from Banff National Park in Alberta, Canada, is Canmore, a town of 14,000 people including 24-year-old Autumn Kennedy.
She runs @tstourtips, an Instagram account with over 330,000 followers devoted to sharing Eras Tour information such as know-before-you-go posts, meticulous itineraries and performance recaps.
“So I always try to put together like a pre-show post,” Kennedy said. “I put in little fun facts about the venues so that they can learn a little bit about them. I put in the concert timeline, when VIP opens, when doors open, also when the surprise songs happen cause a lot of people like to tune in just for that. I also include the livestreams. Anyone who is trying each night, I will post about it.”
Kennedy has been a Swift fan since the artist’s country beginnings in 2006, but it wasn’t until 2015 that she created her first fan account: @loft89tips.
“My whole thing back then was helping people to get picked for the pre-show and after-show meet-and-greets,” said the fulltime receptionist studying to be a veterinarian technician. “I would also help people to get seat upgrades when they were still doing that.”
Then during the Reputation Tour, Kennedy helped 187 fans get access to the Rep Room — Swift’s secret backstage area where fans would take photos with Miss Americana herself. Swift isn’t doing meet-and-greets with fans for the Eras Tour and Kennedy isn’t getting paid, but that doesn’t stop her from serving others.
“It meant so much to me to know that I made a difference in people’s tour experience,” she said. “I really wanted to be everyone’s go-to resource for everything tour-related.”
All hail Tess, the livestream queen
Thanks to the power of social media and cell phones, the Eras Tour can be watched by tens of thousands of fans worldwide in real time. Many of those fans follow prominent livestream influencers like Tess Bohne, a 32-year-old mother of three known in the Swiftie community as “The Livestream Queen.”
“I actually started at first in our laundry room like recording my iPad, and then it was too loud and so I went down to the basement,” the Salt Lake City tech wizard said from her bedroom where she does all of her broadcasts now. “It’s hard when shows get late, like the East Coast shows were tough, because my husband’s trying to sleep and I’m like streaming and singing along or doing whatever.”
Her peppy, kind attitude is refreshing to watch on her TikTok account @tessdear with more than 300,000 followers. Fans can donate to her through Venmo, but it's not required.
She fills the time between opening acts and offers analysis at the close of each show. If a livestream goes down, she quickly jumps to another. She has backup accounts, backup feeds and backup computers in case anything happens. And every show she wears a different outfit. For night one in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she wore a blue “Delicate” themed dress.
“I make a video introducing every show,” she said. “I’m in the process of writing it now, but I have to translate the first part to Spanish."
Bohne plans to incorporate native languages into her videos for each international stop of the Eras Tour.
“My husband’s like, ‘That’s pretty risky. You’re starting easy where you kind of know Spanish, but once you get to Dutch and you get to the other, harder languages, it will be different. Japanese will be difficult, but I’m excited and I like learning about other places.”
More: Airlines let Taylor Swift fans rebook Argentina flights at no cost after concert postponed
Her following increases tens of thousands by the day, especially on days when Swift makes news.
“I found that I like being in front of a camera,” she said, “but I love the stress behind ‘oh no this live went down, I have to hurry and switch before something happens.’ I’ve enjoyed that and at the same time, I am fully enthralled and immersed in this Taylor world.”
Sarah never goes ‘out of style’
For more than 12 years, Sarah Chapelle has catalogued hundreds of pieces of Swift’s style. The fashion blogger can tell you the accessories, handbags, shoes, blouses, dresses, hats, jewelry, you name it the singer has worn in public.
“I just end up either getting a text from a friend,” she said, “or I’ll be scrolling social media and happen to see another Taylor update account post new photos or photos will get posted up on Getty or Google and I’ll see her out and about and I hop on my computer and do my thing.”
She has the process meticulously figured out. Based on the fabric, the cut, the color, the stich or the hem, she can discern which items Swift is wearing. Chapelle posts screenshots and thoughtful anecdotes on her page and has amassed 200,000 followers on her Instagram page @taylorswiftstyled.
“As of late, she’s been wearing a lot of The Row,” she said, “which is the Olsen twins’ brand. But in terms of kind of her go-tos over a long period of time, she wears a lot of Reformation, a lot of Free People. One of the calling cards of Taylor’s fashion, I think, is her ability to mix high and low brands. So she’ll wear a pair of Christian Louboutin boots, but she’ll pair them with a dress from Aritzia.”
Chapelle’s fashion site, TaylorSwiftStyle.com, documents the looks, prices and brands. What makes it easier for Chapelle is Swift will repeat clothing or stick with familiar brands. You may think this fashionista has a lot of Swift’s exacts, but she only has a few including an Henri Bendel bag.
“I received it for Valentine’s Day,” she said. “It’s actually a convertible from a shoulder bag to a backpack.”
Lauren, the Easter egg mastermind
Los Angeles is home to the bubbly personality and YouTube Taylor Swift commentator Lauren Lipman.
Lipman, 32, is a savant at finding Easter eggs (a term defined by Urban Dictionary as something hidden within a film for viewers to see if they can find or not) and posts decoded videos among others to her Taylor Swift Tuesday pop culture channel.
“It all happened on accident,” she said. “I made my channel pop culture from a positive light. Like my first videos were like: Who bit Beyonce? Let’s do top 10 lists of Ryan Seacrest. And then my 15th/16th video was a Taylor Swift reaction video to ‘Look What You Made Me Do.’ Swifties loved it. They descended upon my channel and they were like, ‘Make more Taylor Swift content!'”
The music video is riddled with double meaning props: a dollar bill in a bathtub of jewels, “Et tu, Brute” etched in a column and throne arm stump, a Grammy Swift holds in the front seat of her car and a Nils Sjoberg tombstone. If none of this makes any sense, watch Lipman’s video or ask your Swiftie teen and they can explain the Easter egg phenomenon that drives fans mad and keeps them watching every piece of marketing the star puts out.
“She’s got the world in the palm of her hand,” Lipman said about Swift, “and we just do whatever she says.”
The eternal Swiftie with a TikTok mind
Nashville, Tennessee, is home to Olivia Levin, 23, the hit viral video maker known for quick quips and one liners that her hundreds of thousands of followers share.
“I’ll check it when I get up,” she said about her Instagram account @swiftiesforeternity. “And then I’ll check it throughout the day to see if there’s any new updates that I have to post about, because I want to be the first person to post about it.”
Her most recent viral videos include Travis Kelce listening to the Karma lyric change and reacting when Swift sang "Karma is the guy on the Chiefs coming straight home to me," and Swift's security detail driving through Argentina.
More: 'Karma is the guy on the Chiefs': Taylor Swift sings about Travis Kelce on Eras Tour
Levin — and all the influencers above (except Ciprian and Bohne) — has met Swift. In 2017, Swift sent her a smiley face message, and a couple days later a Taylor Nation representative called to invite Levin to a secret listening session at Swift’s Watch Hill house.
“They were like, ‘Hey, can you be here in six days on Thursday?’” she said. “And I’m like, ‘Absolutely.’ They’re like, ‘Oh Taylor saw how big of a fan you are, can you make it?’ And I’m like, ‘Yes.’ So I obviously skipped school. Why wouldn’t I skip school for that? And I got my hair and makeup done with my mom, and then we drove to Rhode Island.”
The moment is forever sealed in her mind. Even talking about it lights her up.
These are only seven of the Swiftie influencers among a network tied together by an invisible string, a common thread of fandom for the singer. When you ask why?
Kennedy sums it up: “Aside from building community and just being a resource for people, I want to be able to help people and make a difference and that’s kind of always been the goal for me.”
More: The Eras Tour returns: See the new surprise songs Taylor Swift played in Argentina
Follow Bryan West, the USA TODAY Network's Taylor Swift reporter, on Instagram, TikTok and X as @BryanWestTV.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Taylor Swift influencer universe: Who to follow for tips, livestreams
