Spreading optics awareness through short-form video on social media

Public educational outreach is critical for introducing students to the field of optics. Video-sharing platforms, including YouTube and TikTok, are powerful tools for introducing optics to young students, especially as video consumption rates continue to rise. The proliferation of short, casual videos shot vertically on a cell phone on these applications and other social media platforms has greatly reduced the barriers to entry for educating through video. This work will cover the strategies and tactics used by Edmund Optics in recent years to establish and rapidly scale up a video-based outreach program that now reaches up to 13 million views per month. While this scale may at first seem unattainable, short-form video on social media provides a low-cost, low-time-requirement method for achieving this level of reach. In addition to practical guidance for educational video creation, the benefits of such an effort to the company or institution who sponsors it and tips to get buy-in from organizational leadership will be shared. A digital video-based optics outreach program can serve as the foundation for a larger outreach effort that develops the future photonics workforce.