Is it time to move your brand onto Bluesky Social?

Look at the Apple App Store charts today. Bluesky Social is currently in third place, just in front of Threads at fourth. Down in 96^th place, just above a Secret Santa app, is X.

Bluesky currently getting attention at a rate not seen since May 2023 when it was still invite-only, the question is should you build a brand presence on Bluesky? Or is it perhaps time to investigate Threads?

The Sky’s the limit with growth for Bluesky

Just yesterday, Bluesky itself reported that over one million people had joined Bluesky in the past week. It’s a significant number on a platform format that relies on achieving critical mass to be useful – the biggest complaint of Bluesky in 2023 was that once people got onto the platform it was a ghost town. But look again today, and it’s buzzy. People are excited to be on a platform that feels fresh and positive.

Of course, the growth in Bluesky in the charts doesn’t take into account the massive installed base of X. But even that is potentially at threat according to John Burn-Murdoch, Chief Data Reporter at the Financial Times.

John reports – on Bluesky of course - that not only are visits to Bluesky significantly up, but people are also deactivating their X accounts.

Is X a place for brands?

One measure of the appeal of X for brands is to look at advertising. Campaign wrote an article in August (reposted on PR Week) with the headline “We can’t see brands ever returning” – and the reason? A decline in brand safety. Yet last week, the Financial Times reported that “Advertisers set to return to X as they seek favour with Elon Musk and Donald Trump.”

The FT believes that brands are returning to X as “political leverage” hoping that spending advertising dollars on the platform would gain favour with the new American administration. So the complaints in the Campaign article remain: companies don’t trust that their brand will be positioned favourably in ads.

The continued decline of X – is it time to look at Bluesky and Threads?

X is still a strange place for brands for organic posts. There is no doubt it still has reach, but is increasingly a platform of extreme views, and it’s difficult to see its place for B2B brands.

Indeed, 99% of Resonance’s social media focus for B2B brands is LinkedIn which has become the defacto platform for B2B conversations.

However, the rise of Bluesky and Threads should be noted by brands.

Threads, being aligned with Instagram/Meta, is naturally more consumer focused, but the rich data it holds regarding its audience means that for paid campaigns it could become a useful channel – especially for a SaaS company where reach into its target audience is key.

Bluesky, on the other hand, has no paid promotional features. It’s free to use (although reportedly working on premium subscriptions) and the only way to build your reach is to engage with content – the more you engage, the more visible your profile will become.

For brands, Bluesky is very much a place for early adopters. Its community feel is better suited to building the profile of people – founders and C-suite executives – to act as brand ambassadors rather than building a presence for the organisation.

Conclusion: LinkedIn is still the place to be but keep an eye on alternative platforms.

Our recommendation is that B2B brands focus most of their effort on LinkedIn. It has become the number one social platform for business conversations, and that’s not likely to change soon.

However, Bluesky and Threads are both platforms that are growing fast, so sign up and keep an eye on them.

Meta has tried to cracked b2b in the past but it hasn’t landed a significant win on Facebook, WhatsApp, or Instagram. Perhaps it will push hard to make Threads a b2b platform?

Bluesky is likely to remain community-led for some time but once it reaches a certain size - perhaps 100 million users (compared to around 15 million today) – then it will be natural that B2B brands will become part of the community.