Hi ​@madison.skipper, the Healthcare Hub members might be able to share some insight on your question. You can join them and share here: Healthcare Hub in The Arboretum. 

I would also recommend looking into Threads. In my research of all the Twitter replacements, Bluesky still tends to be more journalist focused and I personally don’t know anyone who has fully adopted Mastodon. That’s not to say community doesn’t exist there, but the general consensus is that Mastodon was too complicated.

There was a big spike in new users when Threads first rolled out, then it seemed to cool off. However, I saw a massive surge in people leaving X and posting on Threads during and immediately following the election.

The Threads algorithm is essentially the same as Instagram and hashtags seem to be the most effective way to find likeminded folks. Threads also has a Sprout integration, which is a huge leg-up on the other platforms.

I set up Threads, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts for myself and for the organization that I maintain social media for upon the purchase of Twitter.   We still have a Twitter/X presence, but our main focus this year has been Linkedin, and to a lesser extent, Threads.  

Our Bluesky account has not been very active because I do not see any way to add Bluesky as a social app on Sprout.   My personal feeling is that Bluesky will emerge as the preferred social app due to its effective monitoring and functionality.  It is also not part of the Meta universe, so does not suffer from the rampant fake/misbranded drug sales and porn bots that are a feature of Instagram and Threads.

Mastodon is a pure distributed network so I don’t think it is going to work very well for brand awareness and communication.  We have an account, but do not really use it much.

That’s a really good point about Bluesky being outside of the “Metaverse.” I’m afraid of what will happen to Threads once the ads and bots really get going there.

The Sprout team was very speedy in getting Threads integrated to the API, so I’m curious what their trajectory is for Bluesky now that it’s starting to pick up. 

As a user, I’ve seen a bunch on Threads--especially the solopreneurs and researchers.

I suspect it will take longer to add Bluesky to Sprout because it is not part of the Meta base. I plan to ask for its integration because the more, the merrier.

It was effortless to add Threads since it is integrated with Instagram.  I am sure that Threads will primarily become an advertising platform in the way that Instagram and Facebook already are.  We have not seen a lot of traction or follows on Threads, although we post there regularly.  Our best social growth has been on Linkedin, honestly.

First and foremost, grab your handle on Bluesky. If you have IG then your Threads handle is safe thankfully. It wouldn’t hurt to test both with the same material. Brands are definitely using Threads, some really well actually and have been for the past year so Threads is definitely a place to get started. Bluesky is less active when it comes to brands and it can be really difficult to discover new people but that doesn’t mean you can’t just repurpose the same content there to see if anyone takes interest. I’ve been testing both platforms and Threads is definitely a smoother user experience than Bluesky. I will say Bluesky is better for live conversations like during a football game. So not super helpful for a brand but activity certainly gets charged up during big games.

Mastodon isn’t that great of a platform and I highly doubt it’ll ever be a super active place for brands. We shall see but I wouldn’t focus there yet. You could always save a handle for safety purposes. 

We aren’t leaving for now. BUT, and that’s a big one, we are reducing content from 5-9 posts per day to two per day - one in English and one in Spanish. We still have patients and doctors who use the platform and want to stay connected with them. 

Thankfully when I came on late 2023 and was tasked with creating brand new social accounts, I steered us away from X, as I found it to have little ROI unless you pay for a subscription. The majority of our brand audience is on LinkedIn, but I’ve noticed some be active on Blue Sky. I went ahead and secured a handle there so that we’re ready to post whenever Sprout brings an integration in. 

Hi!

I work in higher education, but more of our academic and healthcare researchers are leaving X, especially in the last month. We’ve maintained a presence there, because it is still the most common place for folks in chemistry, healthcare and physics.

But, more of our environmental scientists and other interdisciplinary scientists are finding a voice at BlueSky, especially to talk to one another or general conversations.

More of our researchers are using LinkedIn, too, especially to share big news (which I what we do there, too).

Hope that helps!

I feel that LinkedIn will become a major player for those industries with the fall of Twitter/X but other alternatives are of course, Threads and I’m hearing positive things about link relevance with the BlueSky platform. 

I feel LinkedIn is an excellent option because unlike many of these other less stable platforms, it’s here for the long haul and it’s the new standard for professional thought leadership on a variety of topics.