How businesses actually use Bluesky
We track a fixed panel of 83 verified business accounts on Bluesky and publish what it does. In the period from 2026-07-16 to 2026-08-15 that panel produced 670 posts, and the single most useful number in them is that 48 percent of the accounts published nothing at all.
Free to quote and to reproduce with a link. If you need the underlying figures broken down differently for a story, write to [email protected] and you get them.
What the panel shows
48 percent of business accounts posted nothing at all
Of 83 verified business accounts, only 43 published a single post in thirty days. The rest set up a profile and stopped. Whatever else is true about Bluesky, the competition for attention there is thinner than the follower counts suggest.
Those who post, post 3.5 times a week
Median across active accounts. Not daily, not once a month. Friday is the busiest day of the week and Sunday the quietest, which is the opposite of what a consumer platform usually looks like and fits a place where people post from work.
A picture doubles the response
Posts with an image or video reach a median of 20 likes, text-only posts 10. That is the single clearest lever in the data, and it is free.
Only 7 percent of posts get no reaction at all
46 of 670 posts received no like, no reply and no repost. For a platform this size that is a low silence rate: a business account is unlikely to be shouting into an empty room.
One post carried a third of everything
A single post took 35 percent of all likes in the period (87,952 likes). That is why every number on this page is a median. The mean would have been 371 likes per post, which would be true of the arithmetic and false about the platform.
The numbers
Period 2026-07-16 to 2026-08-15. Medians unless stated.
| Accounts in the panel | 83 |
| Accounts that published at least once | 43 (52 percent) |
| Posts observed in the period | 670 |
| Observations stored in total | 1958 |
| Posts per active account per week | 3.5 |
| Likes per post | 12 (mean 371) |
| 90th percentile of likes | 394 |
| Likes with media / text only | 20 / 10 |
| Posts with media / text only | 269 / 401 |
| Posts with no reaction at all | 46 (7 percent) |
| Busiest weekday | Friday |
| Quietest weekday | Sunday |
| Busiest publishing hours (UTC) | 21:00, 19:00, 17:00 |
| Posts declared English | 66 percent |
Method
What is measured
A fixed panel of business accounts, queried the same way every day. Per post we store the timestamp, likes, reposts, replies, quotes, whether media or a link is attached, the character count and the declared language. No post text is stored: a barometer is about when and how often people publish and what comes back, not about what anyone wrote.
Where the data comes from
The open AT protocol AppView only. No login, no private data, no circumvention of any restriction. These records are public by design of the protocol.
How an account gets into the panel
Two conditions, both required. The handle is the account's own domain, which means somebody had to own that domain and set a DNS record, something businesses do and private accounts almost never do. And the profile description carries a business marker such as agency, studio, shop, restaurant, brewery or law firm. Media outlets, trade journals, associations, public bodies and intergovernmental organisations are excluded, as are the .int, .gov, .europa.eu, .mil and .edu domains. Follower range 50 to 200,000.
Why the panel is small
It took three passes to get it clean. Bio keywords alone produced 300 accounts of which roughly two thirds were private people who happen to mention a bakery. Adding the own-domain rule produced 96, still containing a gymnastics federation, an oncology journal and a Chilean news magazine. The exclusion list brought it to 83 accounts that are all verifiably businesses. A small panel that survives being clicked on beats a large one that does not.
What this measurement cannot tell you
- This is a sample, not a census. Statements hold for this panel, not for Bluesky as a whole.
- The own-domain rule selects for the technically more capable half of the platform. The panel likely overstates activity.
- English dominates: 66 percent of posts declared English. German-language search terms found very few accounts with their own domain.
- Public top-level posts only. Replies are filtered out so conversations do not inflate the frequency.
- Engagement is counted at fetch time, so a post from yesterday had less time to collect likes than one from three weeks ago. Future issues will correct this by comparing posts of equal age.
Next reading
The panel is sampled every night, and the next issue compares the same accounts over the following month. Brandlix publishes and schedules to Bluesky along with nine other platforms, which is why we watch it closely enough to count.