StubHub Head of Social: How to Get the Coolest Job in Social 🎟️ w/Caity Bransby from StubHub! | Ep. 427

0:00Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast from marketers. We share quick tips, things you can do right now, and then we add a little bit of chaos at the end of every episode. We also keep it short, like this intro. Let's check it out. We are back for Do This Not That podcast presented by Marigold, and we legit have somebody here that's cool. Definitely cooler than me, but that's not saying much, but she's actually cool. So Katie Bransby's here. Who is she? She's amazing. She is the head of social media for StubHub, and the only reason she's on is because she promised me free tickets, to any event i ever want to go to for the rest of my life and all the listeners no that's not the case she is crushing it running it running social at stub hub and they're an incredibly cool brand and we're going to dig into how do you get this incredibly cool job and how does it actually work is it all just one giant party when you're running social for a cool brand like sub hub katie thanks for being here welcome to the show yeah thanks so much for having me i'm stoked to be here uh this is gonna be amazing i'm just curious about something do you this is so off script but because you're at sub hub do you just every weekend you're like i'm going to another event i'm going on i'm going to get a ticket i mean is that your jam yeah pretty much i mean i'm a total like concert junkie so i love music i go to a ton of shows i'm getting more into the sports world i'm definitely more of like a surfing fan so i've been learning a lot more about like football and basketball and i've been going to more of that but a big part of the job is going to shows and going for events and capturing content.

1:34So it's like 50 % of what I do for my job. No joke. Now your job got even cooler. I want to be you when I get older, but I'm already old. All right. So let's back up here. You got one of those jobs. People are listening like, oh my God, I do social media for a B2B boring plumbing supply company. I want to run social at StubHub. That sounds so much cooler. So take us through, how did Katie become Katie? What did you do? Yeah, I mean, I actually started working in social media when I was 19 years old. In college, I got to college at Cal State Long Beach. And I was like, why does the school not have an Instagram account?

2:11And I went straight to the office of enrollment. And I was like, hey, guys, I'll run an Instagram account for you guys for free. Like, I just want to start doing this. I feel like we should do this for students. And so I did that all through school. And I even had some mentors. And this was like 10 years ago. I just turned 30. I had some mentors who were like, don't work in social media. It's not going to last. You should work in out-of-home marketing. And I was like, I don't know. I really like this. This is really fun. And so I just continued to pursue social media marketing. I also felt that it was one of the only career options where I saw that young people could move really fast because you're native to the platforms and you're seen as an expert even though you're the young person in the room, which was like pretty rare to find.

3:01And I was lucky enough once I graduated to start work at the Honda headquarters. They're based in Los Angeles, like the car company. And they have some really cool programs. They have something called the Honda Stage, which is their music program. And I helped them run that. And so I started to get some entertainment experience. I started posting from concerts and things like that. I started to understand kind of the flow of covering live events. It all started from there. From there, I went on to work at NBC. I worked on live events and scripted shows and unscripted shows there. Got the absolute honor of working on the Olympics last year.

3:40And that like really set the bug off. I was like, okay, I only want to do live events. Like I'm tired of marketing TV shows. I just want to do live events. And so that was kind of the trajectory. That's amazing. I love that. And so if I'm out there listening, there's one of two things going on. Somebody's like, well, I'm at Ohio State. They already have a social media account. It's very active. I can't tell them I want to run social for them. Or somebody is like, you know what, I'm five years deep in my career. I want to run social for a cool brand. So is there, what if you're a regular person, you want to break into running social?

4:15Is there anything you can do? Should they just harass you on LinkedIn and ask for a job? I think social is so cool because anyone can get started in it. I have been on teams where I've hired someone because they run an incredible, what we call like Stan account, where they just like love a TV show and they make great memes about it and they build their own audience. And so that's always my advice is just start posting. I like think I should get it tattooed, like always be posting. I always say always be posting. And it's just about like, yeah, finding a niche and starting to run accounts. like converting your personal accounts into business accounts, seeing what it looks like on the backend so that you can speak to it.

4:56There's so much opportunity to do that. And I know a lot of brands who will hire people based off of some of those accounts. Like I know specifically that like Bleacher Report does that. They find fan run sports accounts that are performing really well. They figure out who's running them and they offer them jobs. So that is just the easiest way in is to start doing it. So is it almost like if you're a design person having a portfolio, like if you go in to try to get a job for a social media role, and if you yourself can say, this is the accounts that I'm running, and here's how we're crushing it with these accounts, that it's like a non-starter, like there's no proof that you could actually do what it is that you can do?

5:35Yeah, absolutely. Because I also think a lot of people think they want social media jobs, and then they do the actual work, and they're like, whoa, this is a lot. So someone can come in and say, I've already done it and I like doing it. And here's my example of how I've done it. Well, it's like, perfect. You know what this role entails. So what does the role entail? I mean, do you just walk in and say, hi, this meme is funny. Let's put it on threads. I mean, what do you actually do? Okay. Well, first of all, if you came into a meeting and you told me to put something on threads, red flag. I'm not getting hired.

6:08Okay. I was like, why are you active only on threads. That's crazy. No, I'm kidding. No, the way to kind of get your foot in the door, I think, is to really start to do social production work. That's really what we're doing. We're talking about. We're talking about filming things on your phone, editing them on your phone, adding in captions, knowing what a good hook looks like, how to get people in the first couple of seconds, how a caption should be formatted on each platform so that it's optimized for both SEO, but also like make sense culturally. That's like probably the biggest part of it is just like that creative know-how.

6:48And some of that can be taught, like the editing can be taught, but the gut feeling of like, this is really cool and it's gonna do well, really like comes with practice. And I think also it's just inherently a part of like a social media manager's skillset. So the way that we connected was that you, I put a post out, you put a post out whatever and then you said something to me that stuck with me ever since you said you know when you're in social media or marketing in general you have to move at the speed of culture and you wrote that in a comment and i was like oh that really resonated with me and i guess what i'm curious about and it's for everybody out there who's doing marketing so you know to your earlier point you have to put content out there that's going to resonate with people about what's going on in the moment right now, the thing that's everybody's in like the mindset, but how do you actually do that?

7:41I mean, your stuff up is a big company, right? How do you be like, Oh, this is really a hot thing. This happened on this reality show, whatever. And we're going to put out this thing about it. Like, do you just have, like, you can do whatever you want. Like, how do you move that fast? Yeah. I mean, virality is not magic. Like it's definitely moving at the speed of culture, like I said in that comment, it's about knowing fandoms that are currently happening. So knowing what massive fandoms are driving fan conversation for like a good example is that the Summer I Turn Pretty is a super popular show right now.

8:13And a lot of people are talking about it specifically on TikTok, which tends to skew female, tends to skew younger, and so does the demographic of that show. And that means that now you have accounts like the Steelers football account, making the Summer I Turn Pretty jokes, because that's what people are talking about on that platform so it's really a combination of understanding a platform understanding of fandom and also timing um a lot of social media managers when you ask them like that exact question they'll just say something like well i'm like chronically online or like i have brain worms i'm always online but i do think there's more science to that like i am always online but i'm also always thinking about okay i see a trending conversation when did this conversation start?

8:57Why is it happening? And then is there an angle that I can find? And I have to find that angle in like the next couple of hours. Like I can't wait. It has to happen right now. So when you're like overseeing social for sub up, are you yourself still in it in terms of, okay, we got to get this together and we want to post this or now you got people, they're doing all this stuff and they're bringing it together. And then you're like, that one's good. That one stinks. Or are you still got your hands on the wheel trying to create stuff i got my hands on the wheel and part of the reason why i left working at mbc is that i had just gotten promoted to be the director of social at mbc and i felt like my hands were leaving the wheel because it's a massive corporation and the majority of what you're doing is sitting in meetings and talking about strategy but truly what i love is having creative output every day like i love to actually be the one filming and making content too right alongside my team so i can lead by example.

9:50And I also know what's going on. So I think a big part of it is trusting that your team understands culture and trends. Like if someone brings something to me and I haven't seen it before, which is very rare, but if I haven't, I trust that they are onto something and that they should run with it. But for the most part, like I think that that trust comes because they also trust me that I'm in the weeds and I see what's going on. I think it's like, it was nice of you to say at the beginning like that i'm cool but it's so important when you're in social that that you are like cool in a sense and like that you know what's going on because you have to have that that scale of saying we shouldn't do this like this isn't this people are gonna think this is cringy they're gonna hate this or we should do this like it makes sense for our brand and that only comes from also having your hands on the wheel so when you are talking about always be posting, right?

10:43And I don't know if that extends to your brand, but if it does, are you looking at a certain volume? Like say, okay, on a weekly basis, we got to put up 10 stories, six TikToks, nothing on LinkedIn. Like, is there like, this is the rules of the road. This is the volume we got to put out because at the very least, this keeps us in the conversation. It's a good question. So a big part of my job is also analytics. It just naturally comes with working in social because everything's measurable and i've definitely gotten stuck in the position of of saying we need to do a certain amount of posts every week and what i find that leads to is less quality content because you tell your team okay we need to do this many posts this week and so they're like all right i have to come up with something even if there's nothing going on um and for me like quality over quantity always and so the way i have it structured right now is yes us always be posting.

11:39Like, let's just keep that in mind. But there's no quotas per platform. It's truly what's going on right now and what we think is funny. I mean, sometimes we'll go to a show and we're there. We'll send our social producers. We're there to capture content. And we'll come out of that show and, you know, nothing that interesting happened. Like the artists did, like, what they've been doing every night. So we'll do, like, one post and it might do okay. And then sometimes we'll go to another show like this past weekend, we were at the Chapel Rowan's opening night of her tour. And there was this hilarious moment where she sees, for lack of better terms, she sees her butt on camera.

12:16I saw that. And she forgets that her butt is out because she's like hilarious. And we got to post 10 times about that because it's hilarious and now it's going viral. So truly there's no quota. It just comes down to instinct and knowing when a moment is going to be big and then just capitalizing. So I have a super random question. So let's sometimes I'll put stuff on my Instagram, whatever, and there'll be a brand involved and I'll tag the brand or I'll hashtag the brand or whatever. And I would say never has the brand interacted with my post. I never gotten a like anything or whatever. So when somebody out there is like, oh my God, I went to the sub of we got the tickets there best concert and then they tag you or put you as a whatever is there just do brands just not care about that or what goes on um i care a lot so i started my career by being a community manager and that's for me the most fun part of a social media job the the responding to fans and like building fandom by like getting that banter with them and so i have people on my team who dedicated they are just looking for mentions of stub hub every day.

13:28And they're also looking for things that are going viral that we can just comment on. One of our big strategies is just to comment on things and be a part of conversations so that we stay top of mind. So if you mentioned StubHub, you'll at least get a like from us, but you might get one of our community managers in the comments, like telling you, so glad you had fun at the concert, like it looks so lit or whatever. And so we really try to be there. That's a big part of our strategy. And I've seen a lot of social brands do that these days. There's a bit of a turn towards it, especially with TikTok and the way that TikTok, the comment section is just such a fun place to be.

14:05And you can get so much engagement from comments there. So it's definitely a big part of our strategy. So obviously you all spend a lot of time on Instagram and TikTok, but do the other platforms matter? Does LinkedIn matter? Does Reddit matter? Like are you guys trying to be everywhere or only those two things? Yeah, that's a good question. I think each platform matters, but they each have a different objective. They can each achieve different things. And my goal right now is broad brand awareness with Gen Z. And that's primarily happening on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube shorts with short form video.

14:37And that's where all of my efforts focused. I mean, I think there's totally reasons to be on Reddit and on Facebook and on threads, like you mentioned earlier or linkedin um but right now that's not where i'm seeing um traction for our brand so i'm not putting as much energy towards it but if i had all the resources in the world i'd be everywhere all the time well no but i do think it's important no matter what anybody out there's marketing is is go where your your audience is go where the people are that you're trying to reach because it doesn't help you just to be everywhere if your people aren't there so So that makes a lot of sense.

15:13Okay, we got through all this really fast. And so listen, everybody, if you want to connect with Katie, I'm going to put her LinkedIn in the show notes, and then she's going to blow up and she's like, why'd you do that? But her name, if you know, spells it C-A-I-T-Y, and Bransby is B-R-A-N-S-B-Y. She runs social at StubHub. Everybody go out there right now and honor Katie and buy a ticket to something random. That's what you want to do. Katie, any other parting words for everybody? No, just always be posting. I'm going to get a tattoo. Always be posting. I love getting group tattoos. Let's do that.

15:48Oh, I love it. Amazing. Well, you're awesome. Thanks for being here. And I really appreciate you doing the show. Cool. Thanks for having me. It means a lot. You did it. You made it to the end. But wait, the party is not over. Listen, I want to keep hanging out. Subscribe to this podcast. And if it wasn't the worst podcast you've ever listened to, give it a five-star review. Why not? But you know what? I want to do even more with you. Go to gurumediahub.com and we can partner there. You can find out about all of our free events, all of our stuff. And if you're epically bored, go to jschwedelson.com and we can stay connected.

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