Meet the online superfans who turned their Stan Twitter experience into full-time social media jobs

Katelyn Ide was thirteen when she first logged onto Twitter from a small town in Connecticut and discovered Justin Bieber’s fervent online fandom. Like most fans, she wasn’t content to just hang back and idolize from a distance, but to actively participate any way she could. She ran multiple fan accounts, mastering engagement back when Twitter allowed only 140 characters. Her “finish the lyric” tweets and song prompts circulated widely enough that she accumulated nearly 20,000 followers. “It became my whole personality,” she told me. What Ide didn’t realize at the time was that she was gaining valuable skills for a future career. Now 28, she works as Head of Social Strategy and Talent at Sweety High, a Gen Z–focused digital media company, in a role shaped almost entirely by the years she spent as a rabidly online Belieber. Although she initially left that experience off her résumé after graduating college, she eventually sent a direct message from her Bieber fan account to a prospective employer explaining why her fandom background made her uniquely qualified for the job. Within ten minutes, she received a reply; within days, she was hired. “I truly owe my career to my Justin Bieber fan account,” she said. For almost as long as it has existed, fandom has occupied a culturally diminished space: misunderstood, ridiculed, and shadowed by the old Victorian association between female intensity and hysteria. For much of the 20th and early 21st centuries, the fangirl was imagined as excessive rather than skilled, someone wasting time and energy on trivial pursuits. Yet employers have belatedly begun to recognize that many of the skills now prized in the digital economy were first developed inside fan communities, where intense attachment to artists incidentally produced real expertise through participatory fandom. Fans built graphics kits and analytic dashboards before they knew those terms existed. Those who learned to trend hashtags for Taylor Swift, coordinate streaming