Measuring Social Platforms by Actual Engagement
For years, announcing a new article on Twitter was the standard way to draw readers. That changed after the platform's ownership shift; many users have departed and the time spent browsing X (Twitter) has dropped considerably. These days, new posts are announced across LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, and X (Twitter) alike, with the RSS feed still serving as the favored—if somewhat old-fashioned—method of notification.
Instead of relying on gut feelings about which of these platforms matter most, it's worth examining what the data says. One obvious starting point is follower counts. X (Twitter) holds a significant edge there, though it's likely that many of those followers are inactive or automated. LinkedIn, despite being joined only about a year ago, has already accumulated a healthy following.
Engagement on Recent Posts
To get a more useful picture, the focus shifts to activity on actual posts. A sample of 24 recent posts, shared across all platforms with only minor adjustments for each site's conventions, was analyzed for three metrics: reposts, likes, and replies.
For reposts, LinkedIn and X (Twitter) have similar medians, with LinkedIn occasionally pulling ahead. Bluesky trails somewhat, though not nearly as much as its follower count might suggest. Mastodon, as usual across all these statistics, operates at a much smaller scale.
The data is visualized with a combined strip chart and box plot, plotted as individual dots with horizontal jitter to avoid overlap. This approach avoids hiding information behind aggregates like averages, and overlaying a box plot allows for comparison of medians and quartiles.
The picture changes when looking at likes. LinkedIn is the clear leader, rising far above the others. X (Twitter) and Bluesky sit at roughly the same level. Replies present a different distribution: LinkedIn again averages more, but Bluesky shows a number of heavily replied-to posts that push its upper quartile well beyond the other services.
Interpreting the Numbers
Of the three metrics, reposts carry the most weight as a signal—they represent someone deeming a post valuable enough to share with their own followers. On that basis, the ranking is clear: LinkedIn > X > Bluesky > Mastodon. LinkedIn's dominance is even more pronounced on likes, both because it scores higher and X (Twitter) scores lower, suggesting LinkedIn users are simply more willing to click the like button.
Replies are a mixed signal. Bluesky has generated posts that prompt a large number of replies, but quantity doesn't equal quality; much of the reply activity there tends toward the inane or outright mean. Mastodon, by contrast, produces far fewer replies, yet those replies are far more likely to contain substance worth reading.
Traffic Sources at the Site Level
A natural follow-up question concerns how many people click through and actually read the article. Tracking that precisely would require adding URL parameters such as ?utm_source=mastodon&utm_medium=social, which hasn't been done—both because cluttered URLs are undesirable and because the resulting data seems unlikely to justify the effort.
Site-wide analytics do provide some information, however. Looking at engaged sessions for the first quarter of each of the last three years, X (Twitter) was the dominant referrer in 2023. By 2025, LinkedIn has surged to produce a far greater amount of traffic. Bluesky remains barely visible, and Mastodon can't be tracked through this method.
LinkedIn has indeed become the #3 traffic source so far this year, but that position is still far behind google and direct traffic. LinkedIn accounts for only about 3.3% of the site's traffic, and even that figure comes with a caveat: some traffic from these networks may not be properly flagged as a source in the analytics. One mitigating factor is that social posts drive readers primarily to new articles, whereas the bulk of site traffic—about 80%—goes to articles older than six months.
Overall, LinkedIn has taken over as the number one social network for driving engagement, while X (Twitter) remains relevant. And on a per-follower basis, Bluesky is by far the most active platform.
