X Alternatives Compared, for Marketing

There has been much speculation following the U.S. elections about Elon Musk’s X. According to social analytics firm Similarweb, more than 115,000 U.S. users deactivated their X accounts on Election Day.

Prominent celebrities and brands have left X, and alternative microblogging social media apps such as Bluesky and Threads have seen spikes in signups. However, X is no longer publicly listed and thus is not obligated to disclose its performance.

Nonetheless, it’s a good time for marketers and brands to explore alternatives to publish real-time news and engage with followers.

Threads

Threads is a real-time microblogging network from Meta that requires an Instagram account to use. Threads reserves your existing Instagram user name and verification badge and, via a few taps, automatically follows the same accounts you follow on Instagram. Threads is text-based, with a 500-word maximum for each post, and allows for replies, creating conversation threads. Users on Threads can customize their settings and control who can see their content, reply to your threads, or mention you. Threads does not contain ads, although it plans to.

Initially referred to as Project 92, Threads launched in 2023 as an alternative to Twitter, according to Meta’s chief product officer, Chris Cox. The platform gained over 100 million users in its first five days. Early in November 2024, Threads surpassed 275 million monthly active users.

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Bluesky

Bluesky, started by former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, began as a research project within Twitter to explore the possibility of decentralizing and developing an open standard for social media, giving users more control over their data. Bluesky launched as an independent company in 2021 and was invitation-only until it opened to the public in February 2024. Several celebrities and brands have announced they’re joining Bluesky and leaving X, including pop singer Lizzo and the Guardian newspaper. According to Bluesky, the platform has over 23 million users.

Bluesky resides on the AT Protocol, an open-source toolbox for building social apps that can communicate with each other. The AT Protocol offers account portability, algorithmic choice, and composable moderation with features including automated filtering, manual admin actions, and community labeling. Bluesky does not offer advertising, but it’s exploring other ways to generate revenue

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Substack

Substack is a platform for subscription newsletters, with support for podcasts and subscriber-based discussion threads. Authors can offer free or paid subscriptions and make posts publicly available to non-subscribers. In 2023, Substack added a microblogging component, Notes, where writers can publish short-form posts, share ideas, and join conversations. Through Notes, writers can share posts, links, images, quotes, and comments with their subscribers and the greater Substack network.

Substack states the essence of its community and 35 million registered users is a shared appreciation for quality independent writing. The platform facilitates sponsored content but not other forms of advertising. Brands and marketers can find followers by sponsoring compelling niche content.

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Mastodon

Mastodon is a free and open-source social media network built on a decentralized protocol. Each Mastodon server is an independent entity with its own rules and able to sync with others to form one global social network. Users can go to a different Mastodon server and take their followers.

Mastodon supports audio, video and picture posts, accessibility descriptions, polls, content warnings, animated avatars, custom emojis, thumbnail crop control, and more. Mastodon will not serve ads or use algorithms to promote content. However, marketers can utilize collaborations, sponsorships, and user-generated content campaigns to engage followers.

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Spill

Spill, created by former Twitter employees, is a social platform that establishes a fun, safe, and culturally relevant conversation space for marginalized communities, especially people of color and the LGBTQ+ community.

Users can create, comment, amplify, or share a random thought, called a “Spill,” with the public. Users can (i) create a virtual space via Tea Parties for conversations with live audio, video, and chat, (ii) launch groups and discover members with shared interests, (iii) discover popular Spills, and (iv) automatically get paid if a Spill goes viral and the platform monetizes against it.

Spill is in an open beta release.

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Reddit is a network for social news aggregation. The platform has over 100,000 communities, called “subreddits,” dedicated to specific topics. Users submit content such as links, text posts, images, and videos, which other users then vote up or down. Voting on posts and comments increases or decreases the creator’s “karma” and helps popular and relevant posts rise to the top while filtering out inferior or irrelevant posts. Some communities require karma to post or comment, which helps maintain content quality and community standards.

Experts, brands, and marketers can leverage Reddit by hosting “Ask Me Anything” discussions, which are unfiltered Q&A sessions to update followers and answer questions honestly.

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Tumblr

Tumblr is a microblogging and social networking site founded in 2007 and then acquired by Yahoo. Automattic, the WordPress company, now owns it. Tumblr states its platform hosts over 600 million blogs and most new users are Generation Z.

Tumblr utilizes a dashboard as the primary management tool for users, with a live feed of recent posts from followed blogs. Users can like and repost blogs, publish comments, and schedule posts. Users can also upload text posts, images, videos, and links and publish to other networks. Tags help users find content for a topic.

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Hive Social

Hive Social is a social media platform aiming to improve user experiences through a chronological timeline with no personalization algorithms. It offers self-expression features such as profile music, profile banners, image and text posts, Zodiac signs, pronouns, and full app color themes. Hive Social doesn’t have a character limit, but it does have a verify feature.

The app reached number one on Apple’s App Store in November 2022, during the controversy from Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. Launched in 2019 by two college students and bringing on just one full-stack developer in 2021, Hive suffered some initial crashing due to the massive influx of users.

Hive Social reportedly has over 2 million users as of late 2023.

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Discord

Discord is an instant messaging and social platform with audio and video calls, text messaging, and media. Conversations can take place in virtual servers accessed through invite links. Gamers primarily use Discord, though the share of users interested in other niche topics is growing. As of 2024, the service has about 150 million monthly active users, with approximately one-fourth of its traffic coming from the U.S.

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TikTok

TikTok, from China-based ByteDance, is a social network for creating and sharing short-form videos ranging from three seconds to one hour. The TikTok app has been downloaded more than 130 million times in the U.S. and over 2 billion times worldwide. TikTok also has an ecommerce platform, TikTok Shop, launched in September 2023.

While it’s not exactly a microblogging platform for real-time news, TikTok might be what your followers want right now, especially millennials and Gen Z users, to discover and share new ideas and trends. TikTok’s Ads Manager can help brands create, manage, and optimize campaigns.