With the latest controversy regarding Twitter and its slow, painful demise, many people have signed up (about 12 million to be exact!) on Bluesky as a replacement platform. While Bluesky is functionally more or less the same kind of platform as Twitter – posts are organized the same and behave mostly the same – Bluesky is an entirely different platform with a curated “feel” to it. You may be wondering if this is the next place for you to pitch your business, brand, or services. Let’s go over what you should know about Bluesky to decide whether or not you should try to utilize it for your business.
What is Bluesky?
Bluesky is a decentralized Twitter alternative social media platform, not unlike Mastodon. In fact, if you’re familiar with Mastodon, you may already be familiar with plenty of the things you should adhere to when using Bluesky. However, unlike Mastodon, Bluesky is currently only at one place, run by one team. Confusion over Mastodon’s servers and how they interlink and interact with the rest of the platform (and what happens when they’re cut off) are why many users opted not to use Mastodon long term, and those issues are resolved with Bluesky. Posting on Bluesky is shockingly similar to both Twitter/X and Mastodon; where it hadn’t in the beginning, Bluesky now supports gifs (limited to a repository like Giphy or Tenor), DMs, video, pinned posts, and more. This makes Bluesky look quite appealing as a place to reach your target audience.
But what you won’t find on Bluesky (yet), like Mastodon, there are no ads. Plans have just been announced to introduce premium features that will allow paid users some functionality like custom colors on their profile or higher quality videos to help sustain Bluesky long-term. We may see some introduction of ads in the future (albeit, the less of them, the better) but for now Bluesky is proudly ad-free.
Questions to ask yourself before making a Bluesky account
First and foremost, if you want to make a Bluesky account, you can and should. It’s free to sign up. But, before you fire your marketing team in that direction, consider if it makes sense for you to be there. Here are some questions you can start with:
#1: Do I have something to contribute to the community?
Bluesky was built on a community-first approach, meaning that the people who do best on the platform are willing to help. That means that artists, musicians, game devs, writers, journalists, vtubers, and more are all perfectly slated to use the platform.
Let’s say you’re a dentist, and you want to make a Bluesky account because you want to reach more people. What do you want to contribute to the community? Do you plan to educate people about technology surrounding dentistry and the achievements of modern dentistry, or are you planning to just ask people to follow you and pitch your dental office over and over again? Since Bluesky does not have an algorithm, getting people to reply to and repost your posts is key to being seen and found. If you don’t contribute anything worthwhile except thinly veiled ads, then Bluesky might not be right for you.
#2: Do I have time to contribute to the community?
If you read point one, then point two just hammers it home. Do you have time to talk to people? Do you have time to make posts, answer questions, and go out of your way to find people to engage with? If you only plan to “drop and go” – promote your thing and then leave – you’ll find Bluesky to give you quite the cold shoulder. Building up on Bluesky takes time to gain trust in a user base that is sick of the me, me, me of social media. People are trying to build meaningful relationships.
People understand that not everyone is chronically online, and Bluesky, for what it’s worth, invites people to come on and “flurry” post: repost or engage with lots of things all in one go. It’s okay to log on once every few days and do some things then not look at it for a few more days. But when you’re there you should be trying to be genuine and contribute to the community as a whole. Sales will come passively, or once you’ve built enough trust, you can begin to pepper in your services/products here and there.
#3: Can I adhere to best practices and learn the land?
Like any social media platform, Bluesky has its own idiosyncrasies. For example, there’s no algorithm, so knowing what feeds use what terms or hashtags to gather posts onto it is key to your marketing research. However, there’s other things too. Bluesky has a robust blocking feature meant to destroy trolling at the first instance of it. Bluesky wants to be more inclusive, and the community there urges you to utilize alternative text on images and videos. Reposting is not only done a lot, it’s encouraged to help keep good posts moving along to people who would like to see them by hitting feeds at certain days and times. Talking with people rather than at people is an important distinction between “shouting into the void” a la Facebook and posting on Bluesky. It’s important to get your feelers on Bluesky before you start a firehose of marketing posts and then throw your hands in the air when it doesn’t work.
#4: Does my brand belong?
As a brand, getting the “silence, brand” meme in reply to any of your posts is disheartening, that’s why it’s important that you don’t shill your brand, you work on showing other users the people behind your brand. Be personable, be genuine, be respectful and courteous, and don’t just try to sell people things. Bluesky is a community vibe, a lot like walking into a space and trying to strike up a conversation rather than standing on the table and shouting “BUY MY STUFF!” If you’re not able to abide by these rules, then you may only find dark clouds on Bluesky. I wish you luck!