Comparing two years of Twitter engagement to a month of Bluesky engagement

Like everyone else, I consider giving up on Twitter daily, especially with the US election bullshit. I don’t really read much on there anymore (I’ve tried all the tricks, even subscribing some months ago), but I still post things hoping to get the eyeballs. Since Twitter shut down is APIs (or made them expensive, or whatever), it’s harder to automate posting. I use the free tier of buffer, which is fine, but I’d rather just use Croissant.

Is that even worth it to even post to Twitter anymore?

Here’s the overall views and engagement on my Twitter account for the past year:

And, then top Tweets in the last ~3months (the max I could select):

That top video got 359 views, the next one 271. These are horrible numbers. A few years back when I went short-form video crazy, I’d get thousands of views of most videos in Twitter (LinkedIn is was and remains really good too).

The main thing I care about now-a-days is my newsletter. Does Twitter drive views and subscriptions for my newsletter?

Here’s the past year:

Over all time (December 12st 2022 to November 15th, 2024), Twitter drove 3,786 views and 53 newsletter subscriptions. That means most of my traffic from Twitter was in the past, and no much has happened relative to that in the pas year.

In comparison, LinkedIn has driven 3,179 over the past two years and 76 subscriptions in the same period.

In the past two years, Bluesky is at 18 views and 12 subscriptions. Let’s look at the post-Hightower Shift Bluesky period though. Between October 19th, 2024 and November 15th, 2024 (today) Bluesky generated 10 views and 9 subscriptions. In comparison, for that same period, Twitter drove 79 views and 0 subscriptions.

Views are nice, but subscriptions are the number one goal.

I have something like 11,000 followers in Twitter (I started in 2006 and have had several high profile jobs since then). I’m nearing 900 in Bluesky post-Hightower Shift. If I’m doing the math right, I have a “do followers click on my links?” percentage of 0.7% in Twitter and 9% in Bluesky.

Anyhow. I haven’t made a spreadsheet, but when I look at these numbers it makes me think that when I comes to shameless self-promotion, Twitter is now garbage and not worth the time to even automate cross-posting.

So, yeah: ENGAGE WITH MY BRAND, MOFOS! Oh, and subscribe to what you’re reading right now, my newsletter!

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Sidenote: I’ve been watching the view counts on YouTube for my fellow infrastructure software, cloud, etc. B2B people. They’re generally horrible! After speaking with a few of them who suddenly shifted to good results, I found out the trick: buy ads, buy traffic. This works incredibly well in LinkedIn too.1

Now, if you’re doing sponsored YouTube video in this space (like a lot of people!) who get paid by vendors and others to post interviews with company people and customers on YouTube, it’s clear that you should take some of that payment to buy views. This means less profit for you, sure, but once you start getting 1,000+ views on your videos about, you know, service meshe, obscure networking protocols, RBAC for Kubernees, or whatever other boring-ass enterprise shit you’re hoping will compete with how to make scrambled eggs with an espresso machine…

…wait, where was I? …oh, right…

If you’re getting sponsorship for videos, pay for traffic, and once you get 1,000, 2,000, especially over 3,000 views, you’ll stand out so much from your competitors, and likely your client’s own YouTube video views that you can do more videos, raise prices, etc. There’s probably a spreadsheet you can make. This applies to the tech companies doing this and creatives hustling themselves (if they have the cash).

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I have an episode for later today as well, hopefully.