In this paper, we propose adaptive techniques for multi-user multiple input and multiple output~(MU-MIMO) cellular communication systems, to solve the problem of energy efficient communications with heterogeneous delay-aware traffic. In order to minimize the total transmission power of the MU-MIMO, we investigate the relationship between the transmission power and the M-ary quadrature amplitude modulation~(MQAM) constellation size and get the energy efficient modulation for each transmission stream based on the minimum mean square error~(MMSE) receiver.Since the total power consumption is different for MU-MIMO and multi-user single input and multiple output~(MU-SIMO), by exploiting the intrinsic relationship among the total power consumption model, and heterogeneous delay-aware services, we propose an adaptive transmission strategy, which is a switching between MU-MIMO and MU-SIMO. Simulations show that in order to maximize the energy efficiency and consider different Quality of Service (QoS) of delay for the users simultaneously, the users should adaptively choose the constellation size for each stream as well as the transmission mode.