Social Media Engagement: summer 2026

In order to let people know about new articles on martinfowler.com, I post announcements on social media. I've been doing this for a long time, starting on Twitter back in 2008. After the muskover, social media became rather more fragmented, and I now post announcements on four social media platforms: LinkedIn, X, Fediverse (Mastodon), and Bluesky. It's a bit tedious, but it doesn't take too long to copy/paste the announcements on each site, with a bit of tweaking as necessary. (I also post announcements to my RSS feed. If I were following me, I'd use RSS.)

From time to time, I look at the traffic on these sites. (Last time was in 2025) 1 The main thing I'm interested in is how much engagement I get from each service, so I can get a sense of their importance for my announcements. There are three data items that I can use to sense this: retweets, likes, and replies. Here's some plots of that data for my posts over the last couple of months (19 total)

I don't like using simple averages to compare things, they are often misleading and blur useful information. So these plots combine a strip chart (showing each post as a point, with some horizontal jitter) and a box plot (to show median and quartiles). This way we can see the whole distribution while also being able to compare useful summaries within them.

Looking at this, there's a clear ranking between the services. LinkedIn is clear leader at engagement numbers. I tend to take the retweets most seriously, since they suggest a desire to recommend a post for others to consider. I'll chop off the upper outliers there to zoom in on the core data.

LinkedIn clearly has an edge there, with X a clear second, its upper quartile is below LinkedIn's median. Bluesky and Mastodon are tiny in comparison, their upper quartiles are below X's lower quartile, although Mastdon's is visibly above that of Bluesky.

Looking at this data, there's a strong argument for stopping announcements on Bluesky and Mastodon, as they get such little response. I will continue with them, however, since they are open platforms - and I have a clear preference for open platforms over the walled gardens of LinkedIn and X.

Another way of judging this is to look at source traffic for the website, after all the whole point of announcing posts is to bring readers. Here's some data on that, taken from my website analytics:

This reflects the data above, LinkedIn is clearly a bigger source of traffic than X, which is far above bluesky (we can't really assess Mastodon here, but I expect it would also be a very thin line). But even LinkedIn is a minor source of traffic compared to google. And google's 300,000 or so is a small part of the 1.7M visits the site got in those 90 days.

I last did this analysis in early 2025. Comparing the box plots for the retweets indicates how things have changed.

LinkedIn has grown a little bit, X has dropped notably, and Bluesky has dropped dramatically.

Using social media

The main point of this post was to share what I'm seeing for social media traffic. But this is also a decent time for me to mention how I use social media in 2026 AD.

When it comes to writing to social media, almost everything I do is these announcements of posts on my site. When Twitter was dominant, I'd also share small thoughts, and posts to interesting things I'd run into. I now do that in my fragments posts, many of which are dots on the above graphs. I prefer using the fragments, which is essentially rediscovering the olde link blog, since I have more freedom in what I write there, don't have to copy to multiple sites, and it shows up in my (preferred) RSS feed.

I do a bit more when it comes to reading this social media. I do read any replies to announcement posts, as I'm naturally curious to see what people say about them. I also use social media more generally, in much the same way as I did in the Twitter days. That is, I have a fixed list of people I follow, and I read their posts in reverse-chronological order. I actively avoid any kind of “algorithmic” feed. 2 That makes LinkedIn pretty hopeless for me, as there's no way to do that over there, the engagementmaxxing feed is forced onto my home page. So I ignore it, which is a pity considering how much more engagement it generates than its rivals these days.

2: Yes, I know that reverse-chronological is technically an algorithm, but even such pedants know what I mean. I don't want these services throwing stuff at me to maximize my engagement, their efforts only irritate me.

X also pushes its “For You” feed of slop, but I can circumvent it, as I've always done, by building lists. I put people I'm interested in on those lists, and read those. 3 Mastodon and Bluesky make it easier to do this, which is one of their advantages. If someone posts on multiple social networks, I prefer to follow them on Bluesky, due to being an open platform and its user-interface. I also continue to use RSS feeds when I can, and I'm glad that services like Substack support them.

3: I've found the “following” tab to be increasingly erratic, and often hit with random crap from X, so I've removed most things from it and moved them to one my lists.

Given all that, I haven't really noticed the problems that people complain about for X and Bluesky. Occasionally I get some pests showing up in my replies, but that's rare. Twitter was a mess in its day too, and sticking to my lists insulated me from all that. I really wish LinkedIn gave me that ability, maybe there's some posts on there that aren't slop (and often AI-generated slop). But as it stands, it's sad that the biggest site for me in terms of engagement is also the one I can't stand.

(I might also mention that the one social media site I do enjoy, and contribute to, is BoardGameGeek. It's interesting to see how well it's held up over the years. Being focused on a niche hobby surely helps.)

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