Nearly a century ago legendary songwriter Irving Berlin wrote “Blue Skies,” a song of love and optimism. Today, the relatively new social media platform, Bluesky is providing safe refuge to hundreds of thousands of optimistic social media users seeking relief from Twitter. (Yes, I know Elon Musk renamed it X, but I refuse to call it that.)
The Guardian just reported that Bluesky, started by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who left Bluesky last spring, added over 700,000 new users in the week after the November 5th election. Right now, Bluesky has 14.5 million users, up from nine million in September.
As a former Twitter loyalist, this past week I’ve seen numerous long-time Twitter regulars leave the site, closing their accounts, many top names in their fields. Even those who are staying to “keep up the good fight” are opening new accounts on alternative social media sites.
The Guardian reports that Threads, owned by Meta, is also growing. This month it reached about 275 million monthly active users, up from 200 million in August.
For me, Twitter was an effective medium to spread the word about new articles I wrote and news about small business. In the “good old days” Twitter generated traffic to my and my clients’ websites and engagement from entrepreneurs who had questions about starting and growing their companies.
But that was then—Twitter stopped being that effective for me months (years?) ago. Axel Bruns, a social media researcher and professor at Queensland University of Technology’s Digital Media Research Center in Australia, told The Guardian, Bluesky has become “a refuge for people who want to have the kind of social media experience that Twitter used to provide, but without all the far-right activism, the misinformation, the hate speech, the bots and everything else.”
Bluesky makes it easy to block accounts, which is even more relevant now since Musk just changed Twitter’s blocking policy. The Guardian says that Bluesky gained 1.2 million new users in the two days (!!) after Musk “announced [Twitter] would allow users to view posts from people who had blocked them.”
For business owners who rely on social media, take a look at monitor your social media results. Are all your channels as effective as they were before? Are consumers still engaging with you? Have you updated your social mix? Even before this latest exodus, The Guardian reports that “Twitter shed millions of users after rebranding to X and usage in the US slumped by more than a fifth in the subsequent seven months.”
Bruns says, “It really feels like a throwback to those days of the early excitement about social media in many ways, and that’s what, at the moment, attracts quite a few people. It just makes it more vibrant, more active place.”
Given the momentum, small business owners should strongly consider signing up for both Bluesky and Threads and test them against your current social media mix.
In the meantime, while you can still find me on Twitter @Rieva, I’d love to hear from you on Bluesky. I’m @Rieva.bsky.social. I haven’t posted yet but will be doing so shortly. Honestly, the social medium working the best for me right now is LinkedIn.
I’d love to hear about your social experiences. You can email me at Rieva@SmallBusinessCurrents.com.
Bluesky picture by Diego Thomazini/Shutterstock
