Overview

In 2022, millions of social media users engaged directly with NASA across 14 platforms, sharing the excitement of exploration with their own followers, whether it was watching a rover landing or a helicopter flying on Mars, seeing travel into low-Earth orbit become nearly routine or helping to bring NASA to an ever-widening audience of Spanish speakers.

NASA’s flagship social media accounts reached important milestones in 2022:

197 million followers across platforms, an increase of 33.5 million over 2020
85 million Instagram followers
60 million Twitter followers
25 million Facebook followers
360 million engagements, an average of 82,000 per post, including 3.9 million shares

1st high definition live stream of a NASA mission event, the Artemis I launch (10 million plays)

Highlights

The first science images released from the James Webb Space Telescope saw record-breaking engagement on NASA’s social media channels, particularly Instagram. The Carina Nebula, with over 7 million engagements, is NASA’s most popular social media post ever:

The successful crash of NASA’s DART spacecraft into its target asteroid Dimorphos inspired reactions across social media. The broadcast covering the collision has been viewed more than 5 million times and was the #1 trending video on Sept. 27. @NASA’s Tweet of the spacecraft camera’s footage received 9.2 million views and 332,000 engagements, making it NASA’s second-most successful Tweet of the year.
A custom Snapchat filter allowed users to visualize themselves inside NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the Artemis I mission. It was viewed over 38 million times.
On Twitter, NASA’s flagship account hosted 12 Twitter Spaces events, averaging 39K listeners. The NASA en español team hosted the agency’s first two Twitter Spaces in Spanish.
Also on Twitter, NASA joined the conversation on topics ranging from Super Bowl LVI to K-pop https://twitter.com/NASA/status/1571977394151383042

Inviting Everyone In

NASA’s reach went far beyond those who follow space regularly. To celebrate Artemis I, NASA invited the public to share Moon-inspired content with the hashtag #NASAMoonSnap. People all over the world have joined in, sharing photographs, paintings, sculptures, and even bars of soap. Companies and influencers have participated in the campaign, including Canon, Kerbal Space Program, LEGO, Peanuts, Crayola, Girl Scouts, and National Geographic photographer Babak Tafreshi. Our NASA photographers even joined the challenge! The #NASAMoonSnap campaign video featured actor Jack Black.

Even Sesame Street participated:

NASA Gets Help from Artemis I Passengers

Though Artemis I carried no human astronauts, there were three passengers aboard the Orion capsule. Commander “Moonikin Campos,” named after Apollo engineer Arturo Campos in a public vote, and two phantom torsos dubbed Helga and Zohar, collected vibration, acceleration, and radiation data to prepare astronauts for future Artemis astronauts. Their stories were told in a webcomic available in English and Spanish.

The trio also “live tweeted” from lunar orbit on the day the spacecraft hit its maximum distance from Earth. This takeover represented a collaboration between NASA, DLR (German Aerospace Center), and ISA (Israel Space Agency). The takeover included external partners, such as @Woodstock, @GirlScouts, @Snapchat, @LEGO_Education, @ShaunTheSheep, and @MoonPie. The @NASA_es account translated many of the Moonikin’s tweets into Spanish. The takeover also featured posts written in Hebrew and German.

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