Why does NASA use social media?
Posted: Sun Jan 19, 2025 4:06 am
NASA – National Aeronautic and Space Administration – is a star in building spaceships, the best in depositing astronauts on Mars and the moon and also particularly good at… social media!
NASA is very active on social media
You probably didn’t expect it. Me neither. When I thought of NASA, I used to think of something with floating around weightlessly in a spaceship and tasteless astronaut food. But while writing my previous Google+ articles and searching for successful examples and cases, I noticed that NASA is very active and successful in various social media.
Two weeks ago, there were a lot of reports that NASA had started a flagship account on Instagram . Within 2 days, the American space agency had gathered more than 100,000 followers and about two weeks later, the counter is at more than 200,000. So it is definitely worth taking a look at what else NASA does, how the organization approaches it and what we as marketers can learn from it.
nasa instagram
Some figures
NASA has over 500(!) social media accounts, spread over different platforms. Most time and effort is invested in the so-called flagship accounts. These are the most accessible and interesting for a wide audience. Furthermore, NASA has professional accounts, each of the 10 different field centers has its own account and a new account is set up for each mission.
Decentralized working
How does the organization keep this manageable and clear? Work is done decentrally. The 10 field centers are responsible for updating their own accounts. And the same goes for the project teams of the various projects. What is special with regard to maintaining and updating the profiles; not only the social media team is responsible for this, but also the technicians, scientists, engineers and all other project-related stakeholders are busy with it. The latter spend about 10% (!) of their time on this.
Twitter & Facebook
In 2009, NASA started Twitter and Facebook. Growth exploded in 4 years russia mobile phone number list Below you can see a graph with the growth of the flagship accounts in the periods 2009 and 2013.
Growth 2009 - 2013
Google+
In 2011, NASA launched Google+ . Of all the platforms, it considers this one the most important, due to the fact that Google+ users are – in their own words – more tech savvy and forward thinking . NASA is currently in the circles of more than 1.4 million Google+ users.
Is that all?
Not quite. In addition to the previously mentioned Instagram account , which as mentioned has over 200,000 followers, the organization also has a Foursquare account , a YouTube channel , a Flickr account and a profile on Slideshare and Ustream . Very sympathetic of NASA is that it also uses Slideshare to share learnings from its own social media activities and experiments. An overview of all active NASA social media accounts can be found here .
One of the first questions I asked myself was, “Why is she going to all that trouble?” They have nothing to sell and are not dependent on revenue. The answer comes from John Yembrik, NASA’s head of social media:
NASA is very active on social media
You probably didn’t expect it. Me neither. When I thought of NASA, I used to think of something with floating around weightlessly in a spaceship and tasteless astronaut food. But while writing my previous Google+ articles and searching for successful examples and cases, I noticed that NASA is very active and successful in various social media.
Two weeks ago, there were a lot of reports that NASA had started a flagship account on Instagram . Within 2 days, the American space agency had gathered more than 100,000 followers and about two weeks later, the counter is at more than 200,000. So it is definitely worth taking a look at what else NASA does, how the organization approaches it and what we as marketers can learn from it.
nasa instagram
Some figures
NASA has over 500(!) social media accounts, spread over different platforms. Most time and effort is invested in the so-called flagship accounts. These are the most accessible and interesting for a wide audience. Furthermore, NASA has professional accounts, each of the 10 different field centers has its own account and a new account is set up for each mission.
Decentralized working
How does the organization keep this manageable and clear? Work is done decentrally. The 10 field centers are responsible for updating their own accounts. And the same goes for the project teams of the various projects. What is special with regard to maintaining and updating the profiles; not only the social media team is responsible for this, but also the technicians, scientists, engineers and all other project-related stakeholders are busy with it. The latter spend about 10% (!) of their time on this.
Twitter & Facebook
In 2009, NASA started Twitter and Facebook. Growth exploded in 4 years russia mobile phone number list Below you can see a graph with the growth of the flagship accounts in the periods 2009 and 2013.
Growth 2009 - 2013
Google+
In 2011, NASA launched Google+ . Of all the platforms, it considers this one the most important, due to the fact that Google+ users are – in their own words – more tech savvy and forward thinking . NASA is currently in the circles of more than 1.4 million Google+ users.
Is that all?
Not quite. In addition to the previously mentioned Instagram account , which as mentioned has over 200,000 followers, the organization also has a Foursquare account , a YouTube channel , a Flickr account and a profile on Slideshare and Ustream . Very sympathetic of NASA is that it also uses Slideshare to share learnings from its own social media activities and experiments. An overview of all active NASA social media accounts can be found here .
One of the first questions I asked myself was, “Why is she going to all that trouble?” They have nothing to sell and are not dependent on revenue. The answer comes from John Yembrik, NASA’s head of social media: