Evaluating Adding Social Networks

I would definitely say Bluesky is the way to go!

I’d say that it would probably be a good idea to leave Twitter, although keep your handle there and direct people to the website or a different channel. I wouldn’t completely disappear in case people are looking for you and I’d continue to monitor the platform for social listening purposes. For most companies, Twitter is no longer brand-safe.

As for Bluesky, reminder that you can claim the handle using your company’s URL. I highly recommend getting IT on that now so it is ready to go if you decide to move forward. The good news is that no one else will be able to claim it! Also, look into creating a custom feed on Bluesky to cover the main topic that your content focuses on. If you create the feed, then people on the platform will look to you as being the authority on the subject! That does take a bit of coding through. More here: https://docs.bsky.app/docs/tutorials/custom-feeds

I’d also look at which channels your main competitors are active on and what they are doing. Are they getting engagement on those channels? You don’t want them to be somewhere that you aren’t.

​@mary We have our Twitter accounts go dormant, we wouldn’t completely shut them down. A. We wouldn’t want someone else taking the handles over. B. We would still monitor mentions. 

We don’t exactly have “direct” competitors, but I do know the platforms they are on and it’s the usual ones. 

Thanks for the BlueSky recs. I have looked into taking our company’s URL. 

​@stefanie.gordon That sounds perfect. I think you likely have the correct channels covered. Depending upon what kind of content you would be able to create - TikTok may or may not be as important. 

A lot of this depends on who your audience is, and what your organizational goals are! Here’s what I’d suggest you do: run an experiment with new possible platforms. 

1. Pick a platform to evaluate (ex. Bluesky)
2. Grab your username
3. Start doing some digging to see who in your industry is there, what they share, who follows them, and whether they are successful
4. Look broadly beyond your competitors to see who in general is winning at that platform and with what content
5. Create a plan to test the platform (what will you share, how much will you post, etc)
6. Set success metrics that would mean you’d take it on (<1000 engagements in first three months, 2K followers, takes less than 15% of working time-- this last part is super important because if you don’t have time you can’t take it on).
7. Run the experiment for 1-3 months depending on capacity. 
8. At the end, determine if it is valuable or not, if your audience is there or not, if you have time or not! 

Regardless of what happens, you’ll now have data to help you really make the decision!

Good luck! 

Similar to those above, I’d recommend trying out BlueSky. We did the same thing as you with grabbing our handle on BlueSky to evaluate it in the coming months, though we haven’t been active as of yet. The impetus for this was also a decision to move off of Twitter, and BlueSky seemed like a great analogue. The BlueSky audience seems to fit our brand a lot better than Twitter did and I’m excited to see us use it to maximize the short form text content that we have room for after exiting Twitter.

I also agree with posters above that leaving your Twitter handle up and just redirecting people to your BlueSky (or website or other socials) is the way to go so that people are still able to access your information and to (hopefully) prevent bad actors from pretending to be you.

I’m excited for when Sprout decides to add BlueSky into its trackable platforms and am eager to hear about other brands that have started using the platform and their levels of success & insights!