MITRE’s work and research has a significant impact on safe skies, cybersecurity, defense capabilities, public health, artificial intelligence, even efficiencies in tax e-filing, yet it’s largely unseen and not for sale. We operate six federally funded research and development centers, or FFRDCs, for government agencies. This language and business model does not roll off the tongue or grab attention. So we need ultra creative and compelling ways to inspire people to tune in and engage—and keep coming back. In 2023, our small social media team set out to expand our corporate LinkedIn presence. Our objective: more effectively and strategically communicate the story of our work, its impact, and, most of all, its relevance to target audiences. And to increase our engaged followers beyond current and former employees.
Our four goals: 1) raise awareness among influential audiences, including tech influencers (e.g., leaders at Google), micro-tech influencers (some of the most knowledgeable personalities in the tech world with a smaller but impressive following), potential partners, and prospective talent about MITRE’s research and development and systems engineering expertise; 2) boost engagement rate by 2% in one year; 3) increase number of followers by 15% in one year; and 4) encourage our executives and subject matter experts to share our content and post their own.
Our ultimate goals are to grow an engaged community and be a company of intellectual influence in our areas of technical expertise.
We committed to a high bar of excellence for all content we shared on our company page and to a consistent daily cadence of valuable, diversified content. As a complement, we ran an always-on brand campaign to strategically grow our community and share content that clearly answered, “Why should you care about this work/research/perspective?” With much of MITRE’s work flying under the radar and federal agencies/the public interest as our “customers,” we had to connect our research to everyday life, such as transportation, cybersecurity, and AI safety. We created compelling posts with a mix of media—videos, images, animations, LinkedIn articles, and branded graphics—and complemented our organic posts with a series of strategic paid campaigns using LinkedIn video ads, document ads, and executive thought leader ads (created in-house).
In addition to sharing a mix of compelling content, we engaged as MITRE with key posts from other people and companies. Sometimes that meant simply liking the posts as MITRE or commenting on a new employee’s post with “Welcome to #TeamMITRE.” This showed that while we’ve been in business for 65+ years, we fully recognize it’s our people who fuel MITRE’s success.
Our overarching challenge: in 60 out of 65+ years of service, we rarely engaged with audiences outside of the government agencies we support. This was due to the sensitive nature of portions of our work, plus the fact that objectivity is key to our role as an independent adviser (we don’t take a stance on issues; we focus on data and analysis). Our culture was one of caution, even for topics we could and should discuss freely. Getting our executives and 9,000 employees to embrace any social media required a complete cultural shift. We asked: if MITRE doesn’t tell our story, who will?
We conducted multiple trainings across the company to help executives and staff better understand how to grow and engage their personal LinkedIn network and become brand ambassadors for MITRE. This empowered our people to feel comfortable using the channel and got them excited about sharing MITRE content, tagging us, and sharing our brand and company page with their networks.
Three specific challenges: 1) MITRE’s workforce is highly technical and most comfortable with science and engineering speak, so it took coaxing to persuade subject matter experts to use a conversational tone and analogies in posts highlighting their work; 2) we had to resist the habit of automatically posting very niche events and instead take time to identify the bigger picture; and 3) MITRE’s “peers” in cybersecurity, defense, etc. are generally for-profit corporations with big marketing budgets to promote services and sales and share-of-voice on topics, whereas we operate as a non-profit with limited staffing and funding to invest in targeted campaigns to grow our LinkedIn presence.
We met these challenges using what resonates with our employees: data. We showed the return on investment (through engagements, engagement rate, audience growth, and anecdotal business wins from our leaders and customers) of well-crafted, relatable posts and compelling images.
MITRE’s organic presence on LinkedIn increased from 148,000 followers in 2022 to 178,000 at the close of 2023, a 20.5% increase (above our 15% goal). We saw a 3.13% increase in engagement rate (above our 2% goal), from 3.19% in 2022 to 3.29% in 2023. Average engagements per post saw a 9.46% increase, even with fewer total organic posts than the prior year. This shows that our strategy to prioritize compelling content about our work’s impact and relevance to our audience (paired with gripping imagery) grew a more engaged LinkedIn community.
Another measure of our success: we engaged new audiences through our MITRE Connects LinkedIn always-on brand campaign, which served over 21M ad impressions (image, video, email lead gen) over nine months. Top-reached organizations included Google, AWS, US Army, Oracle, and Deloitte; audiences in public health, broadband, and EMT/public safety generated strong engagement. Notably, our content reached organizations including the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, Google, and US Dept. of Homeland Security. Professionals in IT functions continued to engage at the highest level, with 41% completion rates, followed by operations, project management, and legal job functions. Employees of Salesforce, US Air Force, and Cisco have been highest engaging with 40%+ completion rates.
From March through December, we exceeded benchmarks across the board, with 0.60% average click-through rate vs. 0.44% benchmark, and 33% MITRE Connects brand video completion rate vs. 23% benchmark.
We’re most proud of inspiring a company-wide cultural shift to create a successful LinkedIn channel.
