MIT Central Social Media Strategy for 2021

April 26, 2021

This year, we will continue to leverage our flagship social media channels to reaffirm our global reputation and support Institute-level messaging priorities. In addition, we will continue to feature MIT’s rich, creative culture and the amazing students, faculty, and staff who make MIT the special place it is.

Here is how we intend to approach each channel in 2021:

Twitter

When the Covid-19 pandemic hit, we turned the focus to our internal community on Twitter more than on any other platform. We have always stressed the global nature of this audience and in the past, only posted content that is relevant to all of our audiences. However, last year we made it a priority to use Twitter to talk to our on-campus population about public health messaging, Covid-19 reminders, and related events. While doing this, we grew our followers five percent from January of 2020 to January of 2021.

In 2021, we will continue these practices and center our attention on building organic engagements for each individual post. One tactic we’ve deployed is queueing a Tweet at 3 a.m. EST Monday-Friday, when it is evening on the other side of the globe, rather than posting at 10 a.m. EST. We have found that the 3 a.m. post will get (on average) double the amount of engagement of our 10 a.m. Tweets. This seems to be lifting our overall engagement numbers throughout the day.

We will also look into how we can best utilize Fleets, Twitter’s version of Instagram stories (posts within the platform that last only 24 hours and are not archived).

Facebook

We took similar steps on Facebook as we did on Twitter to adjust to the events of 2020.

The platform is making some sweeping changes which are impacting organic reach and engagements. This year our goal will be to monitor to these changes and see how they impact our public interaction totals. Once we have a better sense of how our content performs in Facebook based on their changes, we can make informed decisions on how to proceed. We would like to see our reach and engagement numbers bounce back to where they were prior to 2020.

Instagram

Our goals this year on Instagram are more straightforward than on other platorms. We want to grow our total number of followers and plan to do this by continuing to optimize our grid aesthetic.

Another new tactic we are planning to implement is being more strategic in how we use Instagram stories. The approach is to use the stories to highlight the schools, department, labs, and centers with a focus on education, research and innovation. The content will largely be user generated content (UGC) — content created by the schools and DLCS — which will hopefully lead more people to explore the school and DLC Instagram accounts.

Linkedin

We continue to be impressed by our reach, engagements, and follower count on this platform. We believe Linkedin provides the greatest opportunity for growth this year.

In the past we posted infrequently on Linkedin, primarily using the platform to share videos. This year we intend to build out our Linkedin strategy and be more active, ramping up to daily posts. We will experiment with our content on Linkedin this year, listening to and learning more about our Linkedin audience so we may better package our content for this platform in the future.