BlueSky as a marketing channel

Why is BlueSky relevant?

BlueSky is a relatively new social media platform. It was founded in 2021 by former Twitter employee.

Letetly BlueSky is growing quite fast. There are a lot of people shifting from Twitter to BlueSky as they disagree with Twitter new management.

BlueSk is now in the 140 million monthly visits range, according to SimilarWeb:

That put BlueSky on the same level as Tumblr in terms of traffic. However, this is still far behind Twitter, which has 320 Millions monthly visits.

Most of BlueSky audience is in the US:

BlueSky might still be relevant if you are targeting other geographies than the US. According to Indiehakers, BlueSky is quite good at generating traffic to links. BlueSky algorithm doesn’t seem to penalize posts too much for including links. The Guardian reported that they are getting three times more traffic from Bluesky and from Threads.

BlueSky also recently launched an alternative to Instagram. That could be promising for visual-heavy businesses.

In conclusion, BlueSky definitely has some potential and you want to consider it as a marketing channel.

How to get started with BlueSky Marketing?

BlueSky is a new social media, so there is no marketing playbook for it yet. My recommendation, if you want to get started, is simply to copy-paste your Twitter content to BlueSky. I recorded a tutorial about how to do it with Phantombuster :

• Try to migrate your Twitter audience. Sky Followeer Bridge is a handy tool for it.
• Following relevant people often lead a follow-back. I’m sharing later some code to auto follow people on BlueSky
• Engage with relevant but posting relevant content

I personally tested the latest tactics. I searched for content about startup and bootstrap and wrote comments on a few posts. This tactic brings about 10 followers per hour spent.

Tools for BlueSky :

BlueSky marketing is in its infancy, but you can already find a few tools to help you out.

Sky Follower bridge

Sky Follower Bridge is a Chrome extension to help you find your Twitter follower on BlueSky.

It is a great starting point if you have a lot of followers on Twitter. However, do not expect a 100% matching rate.

BlueSky schedulers

You can use Buffer to schedule social posts on BlueSky. As BlueSky has the same copywriting rules as Twitter you can use the same content for both social media. Zapier also offers options to automate actions like posting or liking posts: Zapier is a versatile option if you want to automate your content creation pipeline.

BlueSky analytics

Bluesky currently does not report much data. For example, there is no way to know the number of views on posts. This is potentially an issue for leveraging Bluesky as a marketing channel. You can also see it as an opportunity as you won’t be distracted with vanity metrics. At the time of writing elements you can track your marketing effort on Bluesky with :

• Follower count
• Comment count
• Reaction counts
• Click to link

The last one cannot be tracked on BlueSky itself but it is easy to check with Google Analytics. Traffic from BlueSky will appear with the source/medium: bsky.app / referral If you want to monitor comments and reactions you can use Blueview. It is a simple analytics tool for BlueSky, which is completely free.

BlueSky scraper

Apify is already offering a few scrapers for BlueSky. You can for example export results of searches or information about specific posts : If you are interested in a custom scraper for BlueSky do not hesitate to reach out.

Potential for Growth Hacking on BlueSky :

BlueSky is really similar to Twitter so Growth hacks that work on Twitter will most likely work on BlueSky too. For example, when you follow someone on BlueSky he will receive a notification about it, and there is a good chance this person will follow back. So mass auto-follow can be a good growth tactic

Auto-follow on BlueSky

I haven’t found any fully automated solution for auto-follow on BlueSky but if you are interested I can easily deliver a custom phantom for it. For the time being, you can use the semi-automated process below: Step 1: Visit the follower list of Bluesky profiles like mine Step 2: Open the browser dev console and copy and paste the code below:

test = document.querySelectorAll('[role="button"][style="background-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"]')
for (item of test){item.click()}

This will make you follow all profiles on the page.

Of course with great power comes great responsibility. You should be reasonable with the scale at which you are using this hack in order to keep your account safe. I haven’t found information about what should be the rate limit. BlueSky API is limiting auto-follow action to 1666 new actions per hour. I think such volume would be spamming. I would recommend using similar rate limits than with Twitter :

• Keep the Following/Follower ratio below 2
• Max 80 followers per day