Research: NASA’s Twitter Strategy

Last week we had a conference call with a client, one of the largest professional associations in the world. Twitter came up a few times and I couldn’t help be think of one of my favorite Twitter publishers, NASA. This led me to do some late night research on NASA’s Twitter strategy. What I found was interesting and thought others might find value in what I discovered.

I have always been a huge fan of NASA. In fact NASA has done a lot to shape where I am today. I was accepted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. I would have gone too, until I realized that learning to fly choppers was not step 1 to get me into the astronaut program as I had planned. As a result I went to the University of Michigan where I began to study physics; if I couldn’t be an astronaut I could still work for NASA in another capacity. At this point college taught me a valuable life lesson: being good at something and loving it are two totally different things. Couple that with the startling realization of how a physicist makes a living, and I was looking for greener pastures (a film degree.) Even then I spent the first four years of my career in an R+D role for science education and collaborative tools. Turns out I was doing non-physics work, but still living like a physicist. Needless to say, once I stumbled upon the NASA twitter feed, I followed.

Now for the research.

First NASA, as an organization, has an official twitter account. This account is branded as “News from NASA” and probably represents at least a couple of low level communications people who are tasked to populate this feed with all kinds of news from all over NASA. Of course, NASA is a giant organization with lots of different divisions doing all kinds of interesting but unrelated things—the soon to be dead shuttle program is just the most well known.

This main feed covers everything, from key administrators commenting on timely political triggers:

# Administrator Bolden commemorates Dr. King’s legacy http://bit.ly/5OlV6G Are you working for your community?
2:09 PM Jan 14th from TweetGrid

Press releases:

# NASA Revises Cost and Schedule for Displaying Retired Shuttles: NASA has issued a follow-up Request for Informatio… http://bit.ly/91Cw2z
about 9 hours ago from twitterfeed

Retweeting the White House’s fund raising campaign for Haiti:

# RT @whitehouse Amazing! Americans raise $8M+ for @RedCross texting HAITI to 90999 ($10 charged to your cellphone bill)
about 11 hours agofrom TweetGrid

And space missions status updates:

# Today’s station spacewalk to outfit the new Russian Poisk module for future dockings by Russian spacecraft ended at 10:49aET.
8:34 AM Jan 14th from web

As you can see, this main feed is interesting, but is very scattered. I have followed NASA for a while but I will probably stop soon; the feed contains so many random posts I don’t care about. I am sure NASA will not miss me considering the other 220,000 followers.

Beyond the pure posting philosophy detailed above, NASA has some other Twitter activities that should be noted for large organizations. First, NASA has taken advantage of the  fairly new “Lists” feature on Twitter. Lists allow you to collect certain feeds in one spot that is also visible to the public. NASA has two lists: one for the collection of feeds from the 10 NASA centers, and one for the collective twittering astronauts.  There is substantial retweeting, republishing someone’s tweets with linked attribution,  between these 27 entities (NASA’s main news account, the 10 centers and each of the 16 astronauts.)

But it doesn’t stop there. NASA also has a “Connect and Collaborate” page that offers umpteen ways of staying connected to what NASA is doing. This includes Twitter, Facebook, Myspace (seriously?), Youtube, Flicker, chat tools, various outreach collaborative project and even Livestream.  Of course I will focus on Twitter here, but I encourage you to check out this outreach effort. If you click the twitter expansion link, you will see all of the various official twitter accounts. These accounts number in the mid-fifties, not counting the 16 astronauts. Each of these accounts are more niche and draw various numbers of followers who are interested in the unique content that these accounts can offer. Again, retweeting abounds with all the cross over between various projects and locations.

I would argue that the followers of each niche feed are more valuable than the couple hundred thousand followers of the scattered main feed. Twitter becomes an outreach tool connecting a very interested public to content tailored to their liking. One such feed offers even more insight into NASA’s social media savvy:

MarsPhoenix I hope you’ll follow another mission: @MarsRovers, @CassiniSaturn, @MarsScienceLab (the next Mars rover, FTW!) & more at http://is.gd/Sny
9:58 AM Oct 30th, 2008 from web

On October 30, 2008, Martian winter was approaching. The next Martian summer is not until May of 2010 (Martian winter == Chicago winter?). No one knew when the next time, if ever, the rover would be heard from again. This tweet introduced the audience to other chances to follow similar content streams in the future. Even if Phoenix does not survive, the relationship between the team and public can continue.

I encourage anyone interested in crafting a cohesive social media strategy for large organizations to look into what NASA is doing. Yes, NASA is part of the federal government; however, the more engagement it can create with the public the better its chances of staying funded in tough economic times. Government agency or not, I think this is an important lesson for organizations everywhere.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention that during the course of this research I discovered that Google has rolled out a real-time Twitter timeline in search results, similar to it’s news timeline. This should precipitate as many accounts as necessary in order to control distribution to Twitter to maximize search engine traffic.