How to use Bluesky data for social listening

Bluesky is the exciting new kid on the block when it comes to social media platforms. Whilst it’s been in the making since 2019, it only opened registrations publicly in February 2024. Since then it’s seen literally millions of people rage-joining the network as a protest against Elon Musk, Trump and all things erring on the extreme right. And, because of the types of people who have migrated to this site, it has the potential to offer up some valuable insights on a few niche communities. 

Will it be the new Twitter? Is it already the new Twitter? Or will the little blue butterfly flutter on down the same path as all the other social media platforms? Who knows, but the hopeful possibility that it could be a better, kinder place is why it’s attracted so many people now, and what makes it unique for social listening. 

So, let’s dig into Bluesky data and learn how social listening professionals should be using it to analyse online behaviour and learn more about consumers.

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Bluesky 101: What’s it all about?

Bluesky is a micro-blogging site that allows people to share short text posts (max. 300 characters), images and short videos (around three minutes long). If it sounds a bit like Twitter…sorry X…that’s because it kinda is. And that’s because it was originally created in-house at Twitter as a research initiative in 2019. The difference is that it was designed as an open and decentralised social media platform with the aim of giving people more control over their own data and experience. 

The platform became a public benefit corporation (PBC) in February 2022 after breaking from Twitter. Under US law, this means it’s a type of for-profit corporate entity whose goals include making a positive impact on society, not just making money. The PBC is owned by Bluesky Social employees and CEO, Jay Graber, who has the biggest share. She led the Bluesky project when it was still part of Twitter. (Fun fact, Jay’s real name - Lantian - means ‘blue sky’ in Chinese…coincidence? Yes).

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What’s the vibe?

Bluesky is the place where the left-wing, idealistic and inclusive people who used to love Twitter before it became X have gone to recreate Twitter before it became X. 

As a result, the platform has a more left-leaning culture that focuses on inclusivity and, because it’s based on people joining different servers (aka instances) depending on their interests, there’s more of a community vibe than there is on other social media platforms. A lot of this is largely down to the number of minority communities and subcultures, including black, left-wing, transgender, artists and sex workers, who joined during the invite-only phase of the platform’s growth. It was these groups who have also been credited with implementing more robust community management and moderation features than on other social platforms. 

In terms of the content, you’ll find it matches the community you’re in. Many people have likened Bluesky not only to early Twitter, but to the days of community forums and bulletin boards, so users come with a heavy dose of nostalgia and a desire to just have fun. This has resulted in weird and kooky content, such as shitposting (i.e., posting deliberately provocative or off-topic content to troll ironically and derail discussions), but in a kinder and safer environment thanks to the strong moderation. It has a more relaxed vibe compared to other platforms where people might feel they need to curate what they say. 

At the same time, you’ll also find more serious groups here, such as academics and journalists, who see it as an opportunity to share their research and work to other like-minded people without having to worry about it being hijacked by haters. 

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What makes Bluesky different from other social data sources?

The key difference between Bluesky and other social media platforms, is that it offers a more customisable experience when it comes to choosing the type of content you see. Instead of the platform dictating the posts that appear on your home feed through their chosen algorithm, on Bluesky, you can choose from “a marketplace of algorithms” to build your own feeds. This means you only see the content you choose: no ads; no offensive content; no inexplicable “you might also like” posts from random, unrelated accounts.

The federated element of Bluesky - i.e., the individual servers/ instances and networks that make up the platform - might sound a bit like Mastodon, however the way it works is different. On Mastodon, you have to sign up to a single server from the beginning. If you want to change to a different one later, you could potentially lose your username, connections, posts etc. With Bluesky, you can choose to bring content from different servers into one single feed, including from servers and accounts you don’t follow. This also means you can change servers later without losing your on-platform identity and history. And this is probably one of the reasons why Bluesky has become a more popular alternative to X than Mastodon: it combines the privacy benefits of a decentralised network with the user experience of a mainstream social media platform.

Another key element that sets it apart from other platforms is the genuine small-town vibe it has (for now, anyway). And this is because each server can have their own rules of engagement. As explained in this Vice article: “an instance could set its own rules such that its users’ posts won’t be visible on instances frequented by Nazis and other internet shitbirds.” This protects people from unwanted trolling whilst keeping the community smaller and more like-minded. 

This makes it valuable to social listening professionals because people, knowing that they’re in a relatively safe space, are more confident speaking authentically about the topics that are important to them. They’re also more likely to use specific language that resonates with their peers, giving you extra insight into how best to communicate and engage with them.

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Who’s on Bluesky?

Great, we hear you cry, but hardly anyone’s on Bluesky.

Well, compared to other social networks, you’re right. It is quite small. But it’s seen rapid growth in the last six months or so thanks to a certain couple of dudes…

Since registration was open to the public in February 2024, the site grew from around 2m users in the beta phase to 20m in November 2024 to 30m in January 2025. As of March 31st 2025, there are almost 34m users. Bluesky is available globally and in 35 languages. Whilst its growth has largely been driven by Western European and North American users, its popularity also increased in East Asia too, particularly in Japan. And when X was suspended by Brazil’s Supreme Court in 2024, where did 3m Brazilians flock to? You guessed it. 

And people are using the site, not just signing up in protest. In 2024, there were between 1m and 10m daily active users. This sky-rocketed in the days following the US presidential election, increasing by 519% compared to the rest of the year in the US alone. The UK also saw massive user growth around this time too, of 352%. To date (March 31st) there have been almost 1.3bn posts.

The main users of Bluesky are journalists/ media folks, researchers and academics, sports and popular culture figures, and niche communities. The commonality being that they’ve all left X in search of a place where they can share their work and ideas with like-minded people. To give you a sense of the vibe, the top 10 most followed accounts as of March 2025 include Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Mark Cuban, George Takei, Mark Hamill, The Onion, The New York Times and Stephen King.

For researchers in particular, there seems to be a slow shift towards Bluesky as the favoured platform. Jamie Doggett, Associate Director of Lumanity has highlighted how this is happening in the medical sector:

‍“Twitter Journal Club #NephJC, with its thousands of followers interested in nephrology, recently made the decision to focus its efforts on Bluesky…On 12th November a simple tweet ‘see you on the other side 🦋’ seemed to mark the transition, but the twice-monthly Journal Club has continued on Twitter as well as starting on Bluesky.

‍In December 2024, #NehpJC hosted journal clubs on both platforms and users engaged twice as much on Bluesky as they did on Twitter (5.43 average engagements per post on Bluesky, 2.75 average engagements per post on Twitter). If those who have contributed to #NephJC for over a decade follow the Nephrology Journal Club to move over to Bluesky, that will be notable for where the text-based health conversation is happening for one, very large, healthcare community.”

For Jamie, the reason for this shift is “...primarily due to them not being able to access information as readily as they used to. The changes to the algorithm, pushing of verified accounts in conversations, changes to the search function, and the way external links can sometimes be 'supressed' have all been cited as reasons for HCPs to move to Bluesky.”

Now, let’s talk about bots. Whilst the platform was able to remain fairly bot-free thanks to its low user numbers, they have increased in recent months. As bots are an inevitable feature of online public spaces these days, this increase could be a sign of Bluesky’s success. That being said, some of the growth could be down to Bluesky itself. As we know, not all bots are inherently bad. Many are designed to be useful (like this one). For people who want to create these useful bots, Bluesky has shared a how-to guide. So, as always, social listening professionals need to proceed with caution, but for the moment at least, there are far fewer bots than on social networks.

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How to access Bluesky data for social listening

Bluesky data is available via some social listening platforms through an API. To date Talkwaker, Meltwater, Sprinklr and Altmetric have all announced the integration of this data into their platforms. 

And, like most social media platforms, they have their own analytics tools  - Bsky Hub -where you can analyse activity linked to your account.

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What are the main use cases Bluesky can support?

✅Brand tracking
✅Category & cultural trend analysis
✅Competitive intelligence
✅Consumer interests & affinities
✅Consumer trends detection
✅Content topics & themes selection
✅Cultural insights
✅Emerging trends detection
✅Hiring insights
✅Influencer identification & vetting
✅Lead identification
✅Market insights
✅Media & journalist tracking
✅Media research
✅New audience discovery
✅Opportunity identification (engagement/ comms)
✅Reputation monitoring
✅Trend spotting

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Case study: Getting to know readers through Booksky 

As highlighted above, Bluesky is the natural gathering place for communities with more niche interests so it’s a perfect data source for social intelligence practitioners to really get to understand these groups. We got Kim Townend, Cultural Strategy expert, to talk us through how she’s used it. 

Can you give an example of when you’ve used Bluesky on a particular social intelligence project?

I’ve included Bluesky as one of the channels that I listen to across almost all my projects since the data became available. The project I’m going to talk about here was Bluesky specific though and it was an expansion on earlier work that I had done on #booktok. I’ve worked with publishers in the past, and as a proud bookish person, I wanted to stay ahead of the curve on how the book community was diversifying with all the new social platforms that were becoming available.

Why did you choose Bluesky for this particular project? 

I wanted to understand more about who the book community were/are on Bluesky. So many members of the book community were the earliest to exit Twitter and in a world of Reels and TikToks, Bluesky represented another text based social platform. There is a certain type of social media user who is much less comfortable with creating video content, but is good with words who has been forgotten about over the last couple of years, and I knew that they favoured Bluesky. 

Finally I wanted to understand the difference between #booktok and #booksky. Booktok has become all powerful, but it’s also quite narrow in its romantasy etc focus. I wanted to know what Booksky was talking about at the same time.

How did you collect and sort the data - manually, through a tool? 

I collected the data with a social listening tool. I wanted to keep the search as community focused as possible so I just listened to #booksky and “booksky” and didn’t include mentions of specific genres, trends, or authors. 

What approach did you take to analysing the data?

I’d already run a lot of analysis around booktok, so I was aware of the audience and trends that were happening there, and I was able to use this as a starting point. 

I looked at core demographic data and then started tagging up my data set as usual, with key themes, key genres, mentions of apps and specific authors. 

Alongside this I ran a visual analysis so that I could understand a) if book covers were being shared the most, and b) if there were any correlations in terms of colours used or other imagery. The image analysis was also useful to understand more about the audience who often appeared in the posts, as there’s not a lot of demographic data available in Bluesky. 

I wanted to analyse the types of content that were being posted and how this differed from other book communties, so I looked at mentions of bookclubs, reviews, and recommendations.

Did you blend Bluesky data with any other data sources for this project? 

In this project I focused entirely on a Bluesky dataset, but as I mentioned earlier, I did have pre-existing analysis for both #booktok and #Bookstagram to compare it to.

Is there anything in this project that Bluesky data wasn’t useful for?

No! Analysing Bluesky data is just like analysing Twitter data, and that is where I started my social listening career so it’s actually super useful and quite comforting in a way. It’s especially interesting to compare Bluesky to TikTok data, as you’re looking at two very different styles of social listening (video based Vs text based) and comparing the two side by side really helps you understand both the differences and the similarities.

What other use cases do you use Bluesky for? 

I use Bluesky all the time almost in place of Twitter data. I’ll still look at Twitter at a top-line level, but I tend to be interested in listening to more female/ progressive voices, and as we know, that’s not really Twitter’s vibe these days. That being said, if I’m listening for tech/crypto/AI-based themes it’s still a go-to! 

Right now I’m running analysis that compares the same community on Bluesky and Threads to understand more about how similar communities show up on different text based social apps. 

Bluesky is still growing and more and more communities are finding a home there, so I’ll always include it in any top line analysis to check volume of mentions before I set up a full search, because you never know what you’ll find!

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What’s next for Bluesky?

As Bluesky is still a comparative baby in the social network space, the platform is ripe for development. Given its user-focused nature, any developments made in the past have been based on user requests. For example, the introduction of direct messaging, video sharing and improved custom feeds. 

One area that they are planning to develop in future is the Bsky Hub, where they’re looking to add more analytics features (with a hint to a paid version…). The focus of these will be improving the ways that users can interact withtheir followers, manage their communities and build their online presence.

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Stay tuned for more

Hopefully, this has given you a better understanding of how you can use Bluesky data for social listening projects. This information is up to date as of publishing but, as with everything on the internet, things change and evolve quickly, so we’ll keep this as up to date as possible. If there’s anything you think we’ve missed, or a change you’d like to highlight, let us know!

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