In an era of trolls and milkshake ducks, there are perhaps only a handful of social media accounts you can expect to remain pure. Elmo is one of them.
For that, you have Christina Vittas, social media manager at Sesame Workshop, to thank. Vittas oversees Elmo’s social accounts, while a coworker handles 12 other Muppets accounts, as well as accounts for Sesame Street and Sesame Workshop.
According to Aaron Bisman, Sesame Workshop’s VP of audience development, the team posts more than 4,000 times per year across its accounts; last year, he said, the accounts reached more than a billion people organically across channels. The goal is to serve uplifting content to an adult audience, whether that’s parents or educators or fans of the show.
“After 55 years, everyone in America knows of Sesame Street but doesn’t necessarily think of or engage with us regularly,” Bisman told Marketing Brew. “Bringing these character voices to social and augmenting what we do with Sesame Street and Sesame Workshop as brand channels helps really up that brand relevance on a regular and ongoing basis.”
It doesn’t hurt that some adult social media users are clamoring for wholesome and empathetic content from nostalgic characters from their childhoods, like Steve from Blue’s Clues, who has recently found renewed attention on TikTok. Elmo is no exception: a perhaps unintentional wellness check-in earlier this year where Elmo asked followers how they were doing got 220 million views and 164,000 likes on X.
“[The Sesame Street characters] bring so much joy and conversation to the world,” Vittas told us.
We spoke with her and Bisman about Sesame Street’s social strategy and the value of spreading positivity online.
Life through the eyes of a three-and-a-half-year-old puppet
Vittas may be an adult talking to other adults online, but her job requires that she speak to them as a three-and-a-half-year-old puppet with a very distinct voice. To embody Elmo, Vittas said she uses her four year-old godson as inspiration, studies puppeteer Ryan Dillon, who performs the character, and watches the show—a lot.
“Sometimes, when I’m getting in the mindset of planning Elmo’s calendar, I’ll just have our YouTube channel playing in the background to level-set, [get in the] mindset, and get into character,” she said.
There are limits to how much outside influence Vittas can bring to her role. Elmo’s character development is defined within the show, and social can’t introduce new storylines, which means all social content must link back to existing lore from the puppet’s 44-year history.
That’s not to say the archives can’t be an effective resource for new content. Take Elmo’s feud with a pet rock: Vittas said her team noticed people had either forgotten or hadn’t talked about Elmo’s tense relationship with his friend Zoe’s pet rock, Rocco, for some time. By bringing back that storyline, which began in a 1999 episode of Sesame Street, in the form of text and video posts in 2022, she said, they “reflourished a new era of Elmo.”
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Much of Elmo’s content is planned and reviewed months in advance, but Elmo’s account also spontaneously engages with trending topics, which has helped contribute to Elmo’s social success. Last month, a post congratulating fan-favorite Olympian Stephen Nedoroscik took off on X after Nedoroscik replied to tell Elmo he could be a specialist one day, too.
“I didn’t expect that,” Vittas said. “It was just an authentic question-and-answer, and it paid off really well from a metric mindset, and then also just as a fan. It’s so great to see people’s dreams coming true.”
When assessing what viral trends or topics could make sense for Elmo to chime in on, Vittas says it comes down to finding topics that a three-and-a-half-year-old can relate to—like, for instance, Simone Biles tweeting about naps.
“Honestly, if there’s something in the zeitgeist that is sweet or heartfelt, or could get a little laugh from our guy, Elmo, that’s just something that I think plays into him as a whole,” she said.
Fighting the wasteland
Elmo’s viral success in spreading positivity has inspired Bisman and his team to look into how to boost other characters. Last week, Big Bird joined Instagram for the first time, and Bisman said his team sees promise in Cookie Monster’s growing following, especially as the character accounts periodically go viral and interact with each other’s posts.
“I think it also makes them even more real,” Bisman said. “Friends comment on each other’s posts and engage.”
The team is also experimenting with new social tactics for Elmo, like a dance filter that will go live next month on Instagram and TikTok.
One of the goals of Sesame Street’s active social media presence is to help boost website traffic and, hopefully, donations, something that he said can be hard to measure. Beyond that, though, Sesame Workshop is aiming to bring “joy and light and education” to social media, he said—just like Sesame Street aims to do on television.
“[An] FCC chairperson described television as a ‘vast wasteland,’ and our founders, Joan [Ganz Cooney] and Lloyd [Morrisett] said, ‘It doesn’t matter that you feel like everything on this platform is subpar. Everyone’s using it, kids are watching it, and we can teach through it,’” he said. “I feel very much that way about social.”