Creative Marketing on Bluesky

From Twitter to X to Bluesky

I joined Twitter in 2008 and began using it as a marketing tool in music almost immediately. With the popularization of the hashtag, it was one of the first times we could really tap into and participate in a real time stream of conversation. At that time, short urls were all the rage and I created one called twt.fm which allowed users to share music on Twitter. Soon after, I worked with Jimmy Eat World to build a tweet powered chat next to a live stream from the studio and we immediately took over all the top trending topics. It was a very fun time. Twitter always felt like an innocent and engaging social app but little did we know how much that would change.

All of the Twitter activations I developed over the years utilized a freely available API but as soon as Elon Musk took over, changed policies that were meant to protect users, and renamed it X, it became paid. Lots of hobby projects and full fledged businesses were shuttered overnight. Regardless of how you or your client feels about Elon and X, the API pricing there has become unsustainable for most project budgets. I knew it was time to look elsewhere.

I noticed a lot of my developer friends jumping over to Bluesky but I held off as long as possible because I didn’t really want to join another social network. However, at the beginning of this year, I tasked myself with investigating the platform as an alternative to X for creative marketing purposes. My approach was to read through the API documentation and determine if some of my previous Twitter marketing concepts could be recreated freely using Bluesky tech. Let’s first take a look at some of the interesting basic features of Bluesky and then we can cover some more advanced use cases.

Basics

Right from signing up, Bluesky has a very interesting feature: the ability to use one's domain as a handle. So, in my case, I registered with Bluesky and then used my personal domain, leemartin.com, as my handle. So, I’m @leemartin.com. For clients, this is such an interesting feature because it turns every post, repost, or quote into an advertisement for your website. It also doubles as a sort of verification because it proves your account has access to your domain.

Beyond this little feature, Bluesky provides all the basic expanded functionality you’d expect from a Twitter inspired platform. Posts can be embedded into external websites and we can add Bluesky share buttons to our experiences using action intent links. For example, here’s a link to share this blog on Bluesky. One thing I use a lot in my client apps is the mobile share sheet. Utilizing the Web Share API, I can bring up this sheet to allow users to share text, urls, or media directly to social apps they have installed on their devices. So, if I develop an application which makes some user generated content, like a dynamic photo or video, this is the most seamless way to share it. I have confirmed that the Bluesky mobile app on Android and iOS has a tight integration with the share sheet.

Then, back on the Bluesky platform you’ll find innovative features like feeds which are community built timelines of content about a particular topic (like your client) and starter packs which are a way to group multiple accounts into a single follow. I could see a band using starter packs to make it easy to follow every member of the group and all of the global fan communities at once. Finally, Bluesky embraces trending topics and hashtags so you’ll always know what’s popular at the moment.

Advanced

Now, let’s look through a few past Twitter creative concepts and compare technology solutions to see if we can recreate these concepts on Bluesky. There’s three primary functions that inspire me the most: authentication, firehose, and bots.

Authentication

Authentication allows a user to login with their Bluesky account into a bespoke activation we’ve developed and then take authenticated actions, such as creating a new post with a hashtag we provide or following the client’s account. If you recall earlier, I developed a tweet powered chat for Jimmy Eat World which lived alongside a livestream video back in 2009. Well, Bluesky implements the OAuth authentication standard to allow us to build exactly that. I’ve already done a little bit of hacking on this and it just works. The user logs in with Bluesky and then your app is allowed to take actions on their behalf.

Firehose

For me, access to the “firehose” was always the most inspiring feature of the Twitter API. Called the Twitter Stream API, this feature allowed us to get a real time stream of all public tweets and filter them by accounts or hashtags. We could use this feature to watch a particular hashtag and create unique group experiences.

For example, back in 2021 we faked a Times Square takeover for Des Rocs with some carefully curated technology. In order to make users believe the takeover was happening in real time, we allowed users to tweet with the hashtag #desrocs in order to appear on the advertisement. This helped sell the illusion and helped Des Rocs trend on Twitter.

Then, in May of the same year, I developed an interactive player for Waterparks which was powered by tweets. Every time fans tweeted the hashtag #GreatestHits, the volume would increase on a shared player. However, the player would fight back and lower the volume, requiring more group participation.

Finally, right before the Elon takeover of Twitter, I developed an activation for Metro Boomin which required fans tweet the hashtag #HeroesAndVillains in order to reveal the tracklist from his new album. The tweets powered a literal slow burn reveal and both the fans and Metro loved it.

Once Elon took over and started charging $5000/month for similar technology, I thought my days of building alongside the firehose were over. Luckily, Bluesky makes their stream of events publicly available for free and from a bit of experimenting it looks very promising. Using the firehose of posts to encourage conversation around a hashtag really reinforces a group moment and also helps your client stand out in the trends.

Bots

Bots are accounts that post to a network automatically. It may sound evil but it can actually be quite interesting when interpreted from a thematic perspective. This is something I never really got into on Twitter or X but a lot of my friends were really into it. I can imagine a bot that automatically posts about moments from a band’s history or touring legacy. Again, Elon priced us out of doing this on X but Bluesky provides all the tools and a starter template for creating our own bots. I’m looking forward to finding a client who has a good use case for this.

Conclusion

I’m always a bit hesitant about endorsing social networks and inviting my clients to encourage their followers to join them there. However, if you’re in the market for an alternative to X which grants you the same creative marketing opportunities as Twitter, I think Bluesky could be an interesting fit. I personally look forward to building my first client campaign on this platform. Are you already on Bluesky? Have you done any marketing there? Share your feedback in the comments below and thanks for reading.