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CoBL shifting primary social media presence to Bluesky

11/19/2024, 12:00pm EST
By Josh Verlin

By Josh Verlin (@jmverlin)
—

For as long as CoBL has existed as a news organization, we’ve utilized Twitter — now known as ‘X,” though it’ll always be Twitter to us — as our main outlet for social media. 

During the 12 years (and change) that we’ve been in business, we’ve built up a great community on that network, with a mix of players, coaches, fans, readers, and other Philadelphia-area folks and organizations all intermixing and adding to our coverage on the website.

However, the social media landscape is changing, and Twitter is no longer nearly as useful as it was — and continues to deteriorate on a regular basis. Millions of users have fled the platform, and we have noticed a severe and significant dropoff in engagement and views on posts across the board. This is not unique to CoBL; the platform is limiting the views of links to outside websites, which hurts organizations like ours. 

Therefore, we have made the decision to move our social media presence over to Bluesky, and establish that as our primary method of social media moving forward. That means live game coverage, links, news, etc., will now only be found on Bluesky. (We’ll also post some links to Facebook and have some photos on Instagram, but those are our secondary social media channels).

This is a decision I’ve been turning over for some time, but it’s one that has gotten easier and easier to make. Twitter has significantly declined in quality since its takeover a couple years ago, and there are no indications that it will reverse that trend. And even more importantly than that, it no longer has the reach that it once did. Posts which used to get anywhere from 6-8k impressions now get fewer than a thousand; the fact is, people just aren't using Twitter like they used to, for a variety of reasons.

On the flip side, Bluesky has gone from 7 million to 20 million users in the span of a month, and is adding more than eight new users every second. With much of the sports media community making the shift to Bluesky in the last month, we felt this was the best time to make the move. 

Quite a few of our writers are already on Bluesky, with more to follow this week:

I encourage you, if you enjoy our coverage and following along with games, to join Bluesky; various high school and collegiate teams have already started to utilize the network, and we’re sure plenty more will be following in the near future. 

See you there, 

Josh Verlin

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