by Frankie Dailey
NAMT’s New Works Director outlines a new marketing opportunity for artists and arts organizations to approach social media in a stable environment while owning their content online.
Social media is both the birthplace of modern fanclubs… and increasingly a necessary evil. And if you follow me, you might know I’ve been pushing a new platform pretty hard lately for artists and arts organizations.
So, remember when you couldn’t access your account anymore during the “Big Blip” of TikTok? Or perhaps when you closed your Twitter account, you needed to request your archival account data? What if you could just move all of it? Your audience, data, profile and more—take them with you to a new platform instead and pick up where you left off.
YouTube boasts over 2.5 billion monthly users, surpassing Facebook’s self-assessed 2.2 billion. Instagram and TikTok claim near 2 billion users globally, with 500 million active daily on Instagram and a whopping 1.5 billion scrolling daily on TikTok. That’s an incredible amount of competition. With the crash-out disappearance of the fourth most popular social platform last weekend and changing moderation and AI policies, it’s harder than ever to trust these platforms as reliable venues for developing an audience, marketing, or supporting an organization.
Enter Bluesky.
The new AT Protocol platform launched in February and gained 23M users by the end of the year as an open-source alternative to the bot-bastion-at-best anti-social graveyard formerly known as Twitter. Today, Bluesky hosts nearly 29M users with upwards of 2M daily posters, 40% in the US, growing by between 2 to 10 users per second depending on the time of day. But what’s AT Protocol? Authenticated Transfer Protocol is a framework for social media that empowers users with ownership of their content, identity, audience and data. Unlike centralized platforms like Facebook, Instagram or Twitter, where a company owns all data and decisions, AT Protocol allows multiple platforms to connect under a shared standard, promoting competition and preventing any single company from controlling user-created content, even Bluesky. In other words, you own your content instead of renting it.
The second, third, and fourth years were pivotal for growth on the biggest platforms. Bluesky’s most considerable growth to date came in November, which may offer a clearer-than-usual perspective as to where the platform is headed in response to this moment in American culture. Now’s the time to get in early.
Bluesky’s decentralized framework raises the stakes for scrollers and creators alike in two big ways:
- Ownership outside a Walled Garden: Creators own their text, photo & video content, while audiences also own their experience. Users don’t lose their posts, accounts or followers if they want to switch platforms. For example, your Bluesky account could work on another AT Protocol-based app seamlessly. Users with technical know-how can build new features, views, extensions or even their own apps on the same protocol, contributing to a broader, connected ecosystem.
- Algorithmic Choice & Transparency: Audiences choose and customize their algorithms for what kind of content is displayed, promoting transparency and reducing issues like misinformation spread by opaque recommendation systems or For-You pages. But further, creators can utilize focused algorithms to target a niche community through the use of announced keywords or content clues, honing in on a desired responsive audience in a way that only spending ad dollars can on other platforms.
That second point is major for artists and arts organizations, and I’ll offer an informal case study: Using NAMT’s Bluesky account, we “liked” 40 positive posts about musical theatre in user-created feeds, completely random accounts. A day later, 27 accounts followed us back, a massive campaign return on ten less-than-strategic minutes of investment. This minor example underscores the potential for both marketers and creators to connect with the right audiences without relying on expensive Meta ad campaigns or other digital spends.
Ownership is Everything
As theatre artists, we uniquely know that ownership is everything. The keen marketing director or content creator out there might suggest that the greater possibility lies in a potential audience of 2 billion, and to an extent, I’m not arguing that. I’m also not necessarily suggesting leaving the leading platforms or having exclusivity to a smaller network. That’s up to you. However, there is an obvious value as a writer, musician, marketer and content creator to start the process in a space where you can be the owner of your work.
So, share content from there. And why wait for the crowd? Instead, set the tone of a place for new audiences to gather—a home base that is less borrowed, less temporary. Whether you’re an artist, advertiser or just seek authentic engagement, the goal is to grow your presence in a space that respects your ownership over the media you create. You can be an original viral sensation without sweating the tick-tock of a platform’s countdown to chaos or its tumble into the wrong hands.
Perhaps it’s time to find your corner of the (blue)sky.