How the National Park Service became a social media behemoth

This story is the fourth in a series exploring how brands craft standout social media strategies. If you’d like to chat about how your brand is approaching social, Katie Hicks wants to hear about it. Reach out to her at [email protected].

It’s March Madness for chubby bears, and it’s a viral sensation.

Last week marked the start of the twelfth annual Fat Bear Week at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska. What began in 2014 as a one-day event called Fat Bear Tuesday, in which viewers online compared how much the bears in the park grew over the summer, has evolved into a March Madness-style bracket competition on social media that draws more than a million votes each year, Matthew Turner, social media specialist at the National Park Service, told us. There’s even a Fat Bear Junior competition for younger bears now. This year’s finalists, Bear 32 Chunk and Bear 856, are competing today in a final vote; polls close at 9pm ET.

“Fat Bear Week, no pun intended, gets bigger and bigger every year,” he said. “In the last five to six years, it really exploded into this really huge viral phenomenon.”

Each year, the NPS, which oversees more than 400 national park sites, ranging from Yellowstone to the Statue of Liberty, helps the park staff at Katmai, the Katmai Conservancy and the media organization Explore.org amplify Fat Bear Week content. It’s just one of the ways that the service combines fun with environmental facts in what Turner calls an “edutainment” strategy, which has allowed the service to amass more than more than 10 million followers across Instagram, Facebook, and X.

“It’s not fat-shaming the bears,” he said. “It’s to educate the public.”

PSA, but make it fun

For as much as Fat Bear Week has grown over the years, Turner’s team has remained small and mighty. While he works as part of the national communications team, he tends to manage the national flagship account on his own (individual parks, like Katmai, have their own managers, oftentimes park rangers).

When it’s not Fat Bear Week or another tentpole moment like National Park Week in April or NPS Founders Day in August, Turner said much of the focus is on posting tips for people of all ages about how to plan trips to parks and historic sites—and, most importantly, navigate them securely. Much of the content, he said, is spur of the moment and not scheduled far in advance.

“A big part of our messaging throughout the year is safety, especially around wildlife,” he said. “I think we’ve only had two bison gorings this year, which is a lower number than usual, so maybe it's working.”

Taking a humorous approach has helped the NPS grow into the wide-reaching social account it is today, Turner said. Tips and warnings are delivered in a fashion that he calls “safety with a smile,” often leaning into trends, viral moments, and cultural references to stand out and, hopefully, be memorable. A public safety warning about not “[petting] the fluffy cows” (bison) has continued to be a viral and perhaps life-saving phrase since the NPS first posted it in 2022.

“A lot of our posts try to lean into wit, maybe sarcasm or sass here and there, as that hook to get people’s attention,” he said. “But we’re also including that educational component in the rest of the post.”

One-liners seem to work well for the service, Turner said, pointing to successful posts like “You know it’s cold outside when you go outside and it’s cold,” or “If you come across a bear, never push a slower friend down…even if you feel the friendship has run its course,” the latter of which drew some media attention.

“We’re only as good as our last post,” Turner said. “It does [create] a lot of pressure to keep it going, but I think we’ve been pretty successful in maintaining that voice and strategy, and we’ll continue to see growth across all our platforms.”

Bear necessities

While humor tends to be the name of the game, don’t expect the NPS to get too wild. Because it’s a government agency that oversees sites like battlefields and civil rights landmarks, Turner said there’s a responsibility to be sensitive and know when to tone the humor down.

“The National Park Service is this century-plus-old organization that a lot of people admire,” he said. “We want to make sure that we’re respecting our resources and our rangers as much as possible.”

The NPS has faced some adversity before: In 2017, the Department of the Interior, which oversees the NPS, temporarily shut down the service’s X (then Twitter) account after it retweeted two posts critical of President Donald Trump. It didn’t take long for people to try to fill the void and stand up for the national parks through accounts like the Alt National Park Service. After the Trump administration’s budget cuts took place earlier this year, park rangers took to social media to protest the termination of thousands of parks and forest service jobs and defend park preservation.

Last year, the NPS reported a record 331.9 million recreational visits across its sites. While Turner said he doesn’t track park visitation, he assumes that there’s likely an uptick in interest in certain landmarks after the account posts about them. Bare (bear?) minimum, he said he believes that many people have become more aware of the NPS and its different sites as a result of social media.

“We’re really trying to showcase the magnitude of what the National Park Service is and how people can support their parks,” he said.

As for what Turner plans to do now that Fat Bear Week has wrapped?

“Take a vacation,” he said.