5 tips from NASA’s stellar social media presence

Few organizations can match NASA’s celestial social media prowess.

The space agency has more than 120 million followers across all networks, including more than 33 million on Twitter. Of course, NASA enjoys innate advantages—not everyone can take stunning photos from space, after all—but marketers can learn plenty from the space agency’s cosmic content.

Keep these five lessons in mind as you shoot for the social media stars:

Join (or create) niche communities. In addition to its main @NASA account, the agency has hundreds of social media accounts aimed at niche communities. The supplemental accounts include individual astronauts, space stations, rovers and missions. The Curiosity Rover, @MarsCuriosity, has more than 4 million Twitter followers. Its Spitzer telescope, @NASAspitzer, has nearly 131,000.

With these niche accounts, the agency can send content to followers who are most interested in narrower topics. For instance, followers of @AsteroidWatch like to keep tabs on large objects that may or may not be hurtling toward our planet at alarming speeds.