Here’s your gigantic digital megaphone, President TBD!

On Jan. 20, 2017, President Obama will hand his successor the keys to Air Force One, the nuclear launch codes and control over an unprecedented digital machine that enables him to reach around the news media to directly get his message across to tens of millions of Americans. On Monday, Kori Schulman, the White House deputy director of digital strategy, explained in a blog post how the administration will hand over this massive communications apparatus to whoever wins on Nov. 8.

“The president has made clear that a smooth transition between administrations is one of his top priorities, and digital is a key component of that effort,” she wrote.

There are three organizing principles. First, all the digital materials produced by the Obama White House — tweets, Snaps, Facebook posts, YouTube videos, Flickr photos — will be retained, as required by law, by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). Second, those materials will continue to live, visible and searchable, on the sites that they call home today. Third, the Obama White House is setting the stage for the next administration to be able to take over its digital machine when the political transfer of power occurs, at midday on Jan. 20.

So, for example, all the tweets from the @POTUS account will be stored by NARA. But the material will remain live on Twitter on an account dubbed @POTUS44, maintained by NARA. The next administration will inherit the @POTUS account, as well as its more than 11 million followers, but none of the content produced under the Obama administration. (Obama’s most retweeted note on Twitter? His first formal reaction to the Supreme Court case that validated same-sex marriage.)

The incoming president will, of course, be able to customize the accounts, rewriting the bio and the account handle, so that if Hillary Clinton wins, tweets under Bill Clinton’s name won’t necessarily come from @FLOTUS (unless he opts for the title First Laddie). Content from first lady Michelle Obama’s twitter account will go to NARA and will live on publicly at @FLOTUS44. The same will be true for administration officials, whose accounts will be preserved and who will no longer be able to use them.

The approach will carry over to other digital products. The incoming president will get the official White House Facebook account — the name, the URL, the followers — but none of the Obama-era content, which will live on a new page, such as instagram.com/obamawhitehouse or facebook.com/obamawhitehouse.

The official whhitehouse.gov site will likewise become the domain of the new administration, while materials posted there under Obama will go to obamawhitehouse.gov. (Bill Clinton’s White House website lives at clinton4.nara.gov and George W. Bush’s can be found at georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/.)

Snapchat’s messages might disappear for everyone else, but the White House’s content gets special treatment. “Our accounts are configured so that we do not receive any incoming messages, and all photo and video snaps that we generate are preserved and will be sent to NARA,” a White House official said.

NARA will also preserve public petitions and the White House’s responses via the We the People website.

The digital transfer between administrations is no small thing. Presidents have had a presence online for two decades — since late October 1994, to be precise. Each commander in chief since then has expanded the digital communications operation. George W. Bush’s website remains, in some ways, easier to navigate than Obama’s.

But the current president’s approach has benefited from the rise of social media, which gives celebrities and powerful institutions the ability to compete with, or circumvent, traditional news media. Whether the results amount to state-run propaganda or reflect the need to reach Americans across an ever-more fractured communications landscape (or both), the fact is that the next president will have to decide how to harness its power.

“From the very beginning, our mission has been to reach Americans and people around the world on the channels and platforms where they already spend their time,” Schulman said in her post.

As I wrote back in August, the presidents most associated with a given form of communication are rarely those who adopted it first. Franklin Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats built on Warren G. Harding’s pioneering use of radio. John F. Kennedy’s legacy is bound up in television, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was the first to hold a televised press conference — and to win an Emmy. Every modern president has tried to match Ronald Reagan’s use of striking backdrops. It might be tempting to draw a line from Obama’s use of nontraditional media, such as YouTube “content providers,” back to Bill Clinton playing the saxophone on the “Arsenio Hall Show,” but it’s better to recall that Richard Nixon appeared on the comedy TV show “Laugh-In” back in 1968. Obama’s use of in-house media products drew on George W. Bush’s “BarneyCam.”

The digital communications explosion has forced this White House to rethink its approach to the State of the Union. Platforms like Twitter have also altered the White House’s relationship with the press corps, providing a kind of early warning system. And the ability to share a picture directly with the public has tempted the White House to exclude news photographers whose job is to share what is noteworthy, not just what makes the president look good.

The Obama White House also plans to make all of its social media content available to the public via technology such as zip files, while inviting Americans “to come up with creative ways to archive this content and make it both useful and available for years to come,” Schulman wrote. “From Twitter bots and art projects to printed books and query tools, we’re open to it all.”

To follow along with the digital transition, check out @WHWeb.