What should financial services communicators and brands make of Bluesky?  I’ve been up on Bluesky for a bit to help advise clients, and also, if I’m honest, because I like telling the world what I think about a range of financial, media and political matters. Here’s my personal take at this early stage on what it might means for financial services comms.  One caveat is that like everyone, I am learning exactly how to best search on Bluesky. For example, it doesn’t seem as good as X at finding people whose handle is substantially different from their name.

I joined wearily, having wasted time on Threads and Mastodon (which seemed better).  And annoyed that X doesn’t allow me to simply transfer my 4k followers on X over to Bluesky (they are my followers, after all).  I’m sure many feel the same way.  I mainly acted because I found the constant puerile Musk images in my feed infuriating. (As a strong free speech advocate, I honestly was less concerned with some of the “hateful tone” and mobbing, but clearly deepfakes and election-interfering bots are serious stuff).

Bluesky now has over 23m users, having gained over 5m users in the two weeks following the U.S. elections.  It’s talked about everywhere.

Big media has acted.  Increasing numbers of reporters have had individual accounts since the summer, and are starting to be active.   In October we saw many major media outlets – FT, Economist, NYT, Spiegel – issuing “starter packs” – a Bluesky feature that helps showcase your experts and allows others to find them (starter packs can be updated and can be issued by individuals – I’ve just put one out listing 100 financial services reporters).  You can hit “follow all” on a starter pack, as a rapid way to start following content and communities you are interested in.

The NYT, Bloomberg, FT and WSJ now have respectively 756k, 268k, 209k and 64k followers on Bluesky and are pushing out lots of content.  These follower numbers, of course, are still dwarfed by their followers on X, which are 55m for the NYT and between 7m and 20m for the other three.

Virtually no financial services brands seem active yet: some banks and especially asset managers like JP Morgan Asset Management have got handles to reserve the name and to listen.  But plenty of big firms aren’t present (unless the search function is really bad), such as Bank of America, Wells, Vanguard and Blackrock.  And there are squatters at work.

Bluesky came out of Twitter in a pre-Musk age, and is similar in many ways (good).  It uses the AT Protocol to deliver a composable user experience and thus a “marketplace of algorithms”, where users can choose or create algorithmic feeds, user-managed moderation and labelling services.  All of which promises a lot more control.  Bluesky is operated by Bluesky Social, a privately held, for-profit American firm which is a benefit company, i.e. it is allowed to use profits for societal benefits.  This week it used part of its latest funding to quadruple the number of moderation staff it has, but clearly the speed of user growth is making it creak a bit.

The kind of reporters/analysts/pundits I follow on Bluesky are using it actively, but it’s early days, and volumes are still a fraction of X.  I searched “French bond yields” – an exciting story over the last week – and reckon that there’s been roughly ten to twenty times as many posts on X as on Bluesky.

Like X, Substack and other platforms, Bluesky will give potential for individual commentators or influencers to create big followings, some of which may be possible to monetize, probably in combination with longer form sites.  A paid version with additional benefits is imminent it seems.

I suspect that many individuals who have become very used to using X will resist the time investment in changing.  Trade outlets will have to get active, as the likes of The Information and American Banker are.   As to PR and communications and marketing professionals, I see some on Bluesky but not that many.  There is a bit of the early Twitter excitement, but perhaps less gushing.  Already bots and similar are starting to appear.

Many people joined Bluesky to get away from an increasingly MAGA-infused X.  Others would simply like less politics on Bluesky – and maybe the more genuine and tailored  communities it offers will deliver that.

Given the scale of political and tech change over coming months, many different futures are possible.  You can see X’s scale defeating Bluesky, especially if corporates want to demonstrate some allegiance, or at least neutrality, by advertising on X.  But given the momentum of Bluesky and the bizarre behavior of Musk on X, you could see a turning point where the needle starts to point towards Bluesky successfully scaling.  Then you might have two microblogging platforms/ecosystems for a divided country.  In that scenario, could Truth Social somehow combine with X?  You could also argue that X and Bluesky are so similar that there’s only going to be room for one of them, just as in exchange-traded derivatives one contract gets all the liquidity.

The holiday period and the inauguration seem to me a time when plenty of people will think about how they use social media for both professional and personal aims (I’m sure a common New Year’s resolution is to spend less time on social media).

In conclusion, some rough advice (all areas where Cognito will be aiming to learn fast):

• Major financial services brands should be monitoring Bluesky.
• For major brands, it seems premature to start actively engaging on Bluesky as mass audiences are still taking shape on the platform, and they are not necessarily using Bluesky to engage with brands rather than individuals. It may be helpful to reserve handles.
• If you are the kind of economist, market strategist or thought leader who posts on X several times a week or more, with thousands of followers, you should think about getting going on Bluesky now as a hedge. Your fans will be starting to look for you. (Cathie Wood of ARK Invest is posting actively – despite being strongly pro-Trump).
• If you are a firm with many of the kind of experts above, you might want to get them on Bluesky and promote them through a Starter Pack.
• If you are a professional thought leader or executive who hardly uses X and has to be helped to post new content on LinkedIn, there’s no need to concern yourself at all. Bluesky is not going to disrupt LinkedIn.

You can find me on Bluesky at @amarshall-cognito.bsky.social