Mayor Muriel Bowser gave a key to Bryce Harper yesterday afternoon at the Nats home opener (though it didn’t impart any luck). Perhaps you heard about the exchange from a news article about it. But increasingly residents are just as likely to get the word directly from the mayor herself (or her team).

In addition to a weekly newsletter and Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Instagram accounts, Bowser is now on Snapchat, too (@teammuriel). Her first stories featured clips of her congratulating the Nationals’ outfielder and hobnobbing with Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe and Maryland Governor Larry Hogan at the game.

“I think regardless of who you are, an institution or a mayor or a company, you have one goal and that’s to reach people where they are,” said Michael Czin, Bowser’s director of communications. “With Snapchat, you don’t really see that many elected officials but its something that’s worth spending time on to communicate with residents.” The White House, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti are some of the few who’ve already made their way to the service.

And the Bowser administration is ramping things up elsewhere, too. The mayor recently held the @WeThePeople Instagram handle, which is passed along to a different Washingtonian each day, on the day of her State of the District address. At an average of 7.6 tweets a day, Bowser was named the second best U.S. mayor in terms of “mastering” Twitter (“When I talk to people, I like to be straightforward and to the point. And with 140 characters that’s really your only option!” she said in a brief profile published in the report). And after a bizarre kerfuffle with Fox 5 reporter Marina Marraco earlier this week, she even took part in a Twitter interview (hashtag: Fox5Twitterview)

“We’re always looking for new ways to communicate with folks in this increasingly bifurcated media market and you want to build it out in a way that makes sense,” Czin says of their strategy.

Czin declined to estimate how many of the missives come from the mayor herself versus her communications team, saying only that she is “actively involved” with her official accounts. Bowser does entirely manage her personal Facebook account, he said, which includes some posts set to public (but apparently she’s reached her friend request limit). The mayor also has an official page with more than 12,000 likes.

In addition to her own accounts, Czin says that Bowser wants her entire administration to use social media, not just the mayor’s office. They’ve certainly gotten better about spreading information about something like, say, #potholepalooza across the social mediaverse.

Their growing arsenal was particularly useful during the snow storm this year. “We really leaned on every method we could to get information out to people,” Czin says. “So there was a ton of stuff on the listservs, we were active on Twitter, we held two press conferences a day.” The one thing that fell by the wayside? Press releases. “Too slow.”