Bluesky: Are Brands Thriving or Moving On?

Our healthcare brand has dipped into BlueSky but not getting a lot of engagement yet.

We are using blue sky and we are getting engagement. I also track every link click and that tells me a lot. That said, people are using it like they used old-school social media and engaging with the community is a must to help build communications and trust.

That said, people are reeling from everything that’s happened this week and it’s going to be quiet for a little while. 

That’s awesome! Do you track the link clicks natively or using UTMs?

We have claimed our handles, but are not active there yet the University legal team is still reviewing the Terms and Conditions. We do have more than 200 followers there regardless of not being active, and many of them are our experts who have chosen to move from X over to BlueSky. We’re also getting lots of asks for branded profiles there, which we’re declining until we know more and have approval from legal. 

As the University of Utah, I’m getting as good of engagement on Bluesky as i am on Twitter. We have 140k followers on twitter and 2k on Bluesky. btw, can we manage BS in Sprout social?

​@ATL That’s awesome! I just checked out the University of Utah’s Bluesky account. Your content is great and love seeing all the engagement! I don’t believe Bluesky posts can be schedule through Sprout yet. I am using a free version of Buffer right now that let’s me schedule 10 posts at a time. It’s better than nothing!

American Bird Conservancy is getting GREAT engagement on Bluesky! Rapid growth continues, more engagement per post than X or threads, and the quality of the conversation is higher. Folks are asking sincere questions, amplifying and sharing our posts, and making advocacy content without being prompted by us. It’s such a breath of fresh air when so much of social is so toxic right now. We highly recommend! I wish it was connected to Sprout. :/ 

Mid-America Arts Alliance here! We just jumped on the BlueSky bandwagon this week and are seeing more immediate traction than Threads. I love the old school Twitter vibe with a touch of rebellion against Meta.

We jumped on BlueSky in 2023 then it kind of slipped (lack of Sprout integration can do that kind of thing). Came back in late 2024 and saw our numbers start jumping. Picked up over a 1000 followers with minimum effort and getting the same level, if not more, engagement as Twitter where we have 53k followers.

It seems all good for now. Not having it in Sprout is a killer though as we have to do everything manually. The hard stop on 60 second video is a struggle at times too, and the fact it uses .vtt instead of .srt for captions

How are is everyone justifying moving from X to BlueSky to upper management? Our numbers on X are not good (unsurprisingly) and I am ready to move on and phase out our X account but I am getting some pushback. Are people still activating on both until we know more about both platforms?

Appreciate the idea of just claiming the handles! 

I see it as necessary to claim handles on BlueSky, at least to prevent impersonation or trolling. Especially for a bigger brand, influencer, etc. I manage a couple smaller handles for technology/pop culture accounts on BlueSky, but so far, I’ve seen only fractional engagement so far compared to X, in particular. 

We claimed our handle, and I tried posting a bit, but very low engagement. X is still beating it on engagement, but we have seen a rise in Threads usage. I’m finding Threads to have a different audience than X though, whereas BlueSky feels more like X. I’m still not on the bandwagon that BlueSky will catch on though. I feel it’s too niche still. They’re also creating their new app Flash, that is supposed to be a photo-sharing app that I think will segment their small audience. 

​@ajl3photo ,going by the numbers, it does seem like BlueSky growth (especially from X) isn’t quite the same to start 2025 (Bluesky bump from X exodus is slowing down, data shows | TechCrunch). That may reflect who is engaging and in what ways they are engaging. I’d like to see more data on that myself.

I claimed our handle, but haven’t posted yet. Not sure if I will. I’m not 100% sold on any of the platforms just yet- X is not what it used to be, Threads doesn’t fill that gap entirely, BlueSky seems to have had its moment. I’m willing to test on all of the platforms, but I think it’s important to remember that this will be helpful in establishing new baseline metrics rather than trying to accomplish what once was with Twitter.