A day in the life running @Vegas
Opening night of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, flying monkeys, and 138 posts: an hour-by-hour dispatch from the big premiere.
I’ve covered a lot of industries in this newsletter. We’ve talked about how to market software and healthcare and kitchenware. But how does one market a…city?
For today’s newsletter, we’re getting a peek into what it’s like running social for one of the most-followed destinations in the world: Las Vegas. I asked Bryce Betts, Director of Digital Content at Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority a.k.a @Vegas, to take me along for a day in the life.
Because it’s Vegas, it isn’t just any day. It’s opening night of The Wizard of Oz at Sphere. Bryce documented an hour-by-hour account of one of the highest-pressure, highest-reward days they’ve tackled—complete with flying monkeys, viral twister posts, and Kris Jenner.
FYI there are some spoilers from the show below!
12:25 p.m. (the day before the premiere) Our four social team members attending Sphere’s premiere tomorrow watched the original Wizard of Oz over some pizza. The goal is to define moments to capture, spitball some captions, and pre-build CapCut templates. If you’ve never seen four creators debate a “twister shot,” it’s something.
We are going into Sphere with:
Defined concepts
Bookmarked moments
Pre-approved captions
Data/context on past post performance at Sphere
Our most-viewed Sphere TikTok has 26.9M views, 1.4M likes, and earned us 86.5K followers. We want to see if we can top that tomorrow.
9:15 a.m. (the day of the premiere) The team was at the Venetian for Wizard of Oz themed donuts (Donutique) and milkshakes (Black Tap).
Immediately after filming, the team went home and split up the work: Owen edited milkshakes, Gennah edited donuts, Zach edited his photos for X and future VisitLasVegas.com features. All content was posted before heading back to Sphere in the afternoon.
11:30 a.m. Meanwhile I was overseeing a few shoots at AREA15 for a brand campaign unrelated to The Wizard of Oz. While today is all about The Wizard of Oz at Sphere, the city is still the star, so our job is to show off all the reasons to visit.
We really approach @Vegas like a media brand, not a tourism board. We think about what's entertaining, and worth sharing, not just what's promotional. That means acting fast, testing formats, and embracing all that comes with covering the sports and entertainment capital of the world.
5:25 p.m. Yellow carpet time! Or so we thought. We arrived at 5:25 (our call time was 5:30), only to find it started at 4:45. Owen (our carpet lead) snapped into action with his iPhone and mics asking Judy Garland’s daughter how many flying monkeys we will see, and a distant Kris Jenner video accumulated 2.6M views and counting.
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6:15 p.m. While Owen handled the Yellow Carpet, Gennah and Zach filmed a content series called “Here for the Snacks”. We’ll sometimes go to events like the NBA Summer League and Universal Horror Unleashed and highlight the food instead of the event itself.
Unfortunately we later found out that most of the food was special offerings for the premiere. This video will never see the light of day, but I’m still thinking about those twister fries.
7:10 p.m. Final meeting with all the team, going over what to focus on and what should go on each platform.
Above you’ll see our tools of the trade—AirPods to hear what we’re posting, some microphones, lights, and, most importantly, lots of charging banks.
Typically during non-live events, our content team creates content through our workflow in our project management software, monday.com. We have workflows for content to go from an idea, to outreaching to properties, to scheduled, filmed, edited, and finally scheduled on our social calendar. In that process, I will review the content from a creative lens, and our strategy team will review the content through the lens of brand safety, proper partner coverage, and, of course, spelling errors.
But for live events like the world premiere of Wizard of Oz, we know there are thousands of users all posting live and competing for attention. Two hours of approvals can really hinder performance. So we try to remove all barriers, and enable creators to post quickly in the moment. To do this, we remove as much friction as possible by pre-defining some concepts and creating some captions. But in live events, you don’t know what will happen. So our creators are armed with a lot of information around what has performed in the past in similar events, and are encouraged to just press publish.
7:40 p.m. Sphere seats secured, while Owen edited his red carpet spots in CapCut while Zach and Gennah rehearsed twister shots. Picture this: you’re beside someone who is pointing to a screen while nothing is happening, and the person beside them is filming them, panning to the screen. They watch the footage, and do it again multiple times. That practice paid off around 30 minutes later.
8:22 p.m. Judy Garland grabs Toto, and we pan through the screen. It’s our first pre-defined post, and it pops: 2.6M views.
8:28 p.m. Twister time—and practice pays off to the tune of 13.1M TikTok views, 821K Instagram views, and 12.3M Facebook impressions.
8:47 p.m. In our research, we flagged the falling apples as a must-catch moment. (Yes, the audience gets actual foam apples “thrown” at them during a specific scene.) One landed near me, and I narrowly missed the catch but the post is the @Vegas account’s third most engaged TikTok ever: 10.7M views and 9,828 new followers.
9:15 p.m. By having two creators seated by each other, the team was able to edit and post videos live without worrying about missing a moment. Such as this inside vs outside video which utilized a pre-made template in CapCut.
9:17 p.m. Giant flying monkey drones soar over the crowd in sync with Sphere visuals, the last 4D element we had defined for content capture. This shot perfectly matched what we’ve identified as top performing Sphere posts. Showing the crowd for scale while panning to reveal more of the screen and keeping retention up. After capturing I rushed to post first on TikTok, IG, FB earning 2.8M, 793K, 8.1M impressions, respectively.
9:28 p.m. Judy heels-clicks home to Kansas and 21 TikToks are already posted during the movie.
11:15 p.m. We’ve identified some tables at a closed coffee shop inside the Palazzo as our official late-night edit editing spot after the show. We grabbed our laptops, and started creating some of our more complicated spots, such as ranking the top 10 songs and Comparing 1939 clips vs 2025 clips.
We also look at current post performance and adjust accordingly. We noticed our first “outside vs inside” Reel was not performing well, so we edited some new “inside vs outside" spots. We tried starting the video inside Sphere, which performed better. Every post is an opportunity to learn, so we post a lot. And the more we learn, the better we get.
12:28 a.m. Head home but the job isn’t quite done.
1:40 a.m. Final TikToks go live, and top clips uploaded to monday.com for our Senior Social Media Manager to post clips to our Spanish page @VegasEnEspanol in the morning.
By the looks of how posts are popping at this point, I had a good idea it would be one of our most engaging events we've covered. But the final impressions shattered any expectations, with 115.2M impressions and 3.9M engagements across 138 posts. It’s not every day you get to cover an event the world cares about on social media, but when you do, make sure to lower the friction to post. Cinematic sizzle video recaps a day later are a thing for the past. Thanks for following along!
Finally, there are some great new jobs on the Link in Bio Job Board. Like Community Manager (Part Time Contractor) at Parallel, Social Media Strategist for Häagen-Dazs, and Head of Social, Community & Creator at Warner Bros. Games.
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