The X-odus? Big organizations are turning away from X and Meta. Where will they go?

Twitter has long occupied an unusual space for B2B marketing. On one hand, our customers are humans. Many of them are passionate about what they do. A platform like Twitter—X—offers an opportunity to engage on a human level with prospective customers. It can allow brands to respond directly to criticism and praise alike; to connect existing customers with support and resources if need be; to monitor brand awareness and market penetration.

On the other hand, it’s no LinkedIn. X is a big, noisy place full of political arguments, adult content, trolls, and celebrity gossip. It’s run by the most (in)famous billionaire in the world, and he’s…very hands-on. In light of Elon Musk’s appearance at Trump’s inauguration, where he made what can most generously be described as an awkward hand gesture (and less generously described as a Nazi salute), more and more brands and individuals are leaving X for greener, or perhaps bluer pastures.

It’s not the first time we’ve seen users flee X. When Musk purchased the platform, a number of celebrities announced they would leave the platform. Changes to content moderation have resulted in a sharp decline in advertising revenue for Twitter. A 2024 report revealed an 84% decline in ad revenue since Musk’s acquisition.

For advertisers, it’s all about increased brand risk. Although brands are less risk averse today than in previous decades, very few want to be associated with extreme politics, adult content, bigotry, or racism. As these topics became more prevalant on X, advertisers chose to scale back their ad budgets. Some of the bigger entities to abandon X include Interpublic Group and GroupM, two ad agencies that together represent hundreds of clients across consumer and B2B sectors.

So where are users going, and is it worth following them to another platform? We recently saw TikTok (nearly) get banned. There’s ongoing turmoil at Meta and on platforms like Reddit. It would seem that social media marketing is in flux right now, and it’s not that clear how the landscape might look by 2030. With that in mind, let’s look at some of the top landing spots for X’s refugees and determine their viability for B2B marketing.

Null hypothesis: why not just stay on X?

It’s a question well worth asking. The answer is sure! Stay on X. A big portion of your audience is still there, and will be there tomorrow, and don’t care at all about platform changes, algorithms, or Elon Musk.

X remains the largest short format text based social media platform in the world by an order of magnitude. For many of us working in the B2B sector, our core audience remains active and engaged on X. As alluded to before, the calculation to be made is one of brand risk. Due to its lax moderation standards and arguable right-wing bent, there’s a higher likelihood that your brand’s paid or organic post will appear next to violent, adult, or extremist content on X than on other platforms.

I think a compelling case could be made that brand safety is overblown in 2025. The average person isn’t clutching their pearls at the sight of an unseemly social media post. One might argue that we’re leaving behind a particularly moderated era of internet discourse—that this “free speech absolutist” movement across social media is a return to normalcy in some ways, even if it’s both not that “free” and comes with some serious downsides. As advertisers continue to flee X, contrarians may be able to take advantage of expanded inventory from reduced competition.

Nonetheless, X’s audience is changing. Are some of your customers leaving it behind? Let’s find out.

Bluesky, X’s mirror image

The X-odus hasn’t flowed in a single direction. Among several landing spots, a subset of Twitter users have made their way to upstart competitor Bluesky. Bluesky, initially backed by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, is a carbon-copy clone of Twitter. From brand colours to overall design and functionality, it’s essentially what Twitter was ten years ago—at least on the surface.

Behind the scenes, Bluesky is a different beast. Where X is increasingly a “black box,” Bluesky is explicitly open source and aims to be more privacy friendly through decentralized infrastructure and a greater ability to customize ones’ feed. Robust content filters, block lists, and “starter packs” consisting of quality accounts to follow for nearly any niche give it a bit of a Reddit flavour. Users can restrict their engagement to just their hobbies and interests, or they can engage in a wider community. It’s up to each individual.

For now, Bluesky is ad-free. Expect that to change in the future as the platform reaches maturity and looks to monetize its product. When exactly that happens is hard to say. Recent figures suggest Bluesky has no more than 30 million users in total, and around 3 million daily active users. Compare to X’s 600+ million accounts and you can see how far the platform has to go before it’s on the same level.

Marketing on Bluesky: No paid options (yet), limited and highly political userbase

Speaking from experience, the new user onboarding process for Bluesky is a bit rocky. When a user first signs up, they’re asked to choose several general interests to curate their initial discovery feed. I chose some apolitical categories like sports, art, photography, and movies. What I got was a feed of left-wing content. It took extensive keyword filtering and curation to clean it up and turn it into a generally less political hobby feed.

The challenge is that the kind of user most likely to leave X for Bluesky is the kind of user most opposed to the direction of X. That means that few moderates and many hard-line progressives migrated over. It creates a strange mirror effect where X leans far to the right and Bluesky leans equally hard to the left.

A decade of experience in the B2B world has taught me that customers come in all shapes and sizes. From die-hard MAGA enthusiasts to progressive Christian evangelicals to feminist environmentalists, I’ve worked with clients across the cultural and political spectrum. Some prospects will be on Bluesky, others on X. Hell, some will be on Truth Social. The point is, Bluesky is defined by its politics in the same way X (increasingly) is. It may be most effective to use platforms like Bluesky to broadcast progressive policies and champion progressive causes. If you have a Pride or Black History Month campaign, it might do far better on a per-user basis on Bluesky than on X.

Nonetheless, consider overall audience size. You may be able to generate better and more authentic engagements on a smaller platform, but the overall reach is a fraction of other platforms. For now, anyway.

Mastodon: non-profit, decentralized social media

Other former X users fled for Mastodon. Mastodon is not as easily understood as conventional social media platforms. Instead of relying on a single, centralized server, Mastodon is comprised of nearly 10,000 individually operated servers, usually targeted to particular geographies, interests, hobbies, or other defining factors. These servers are all interconnected by what Mastodon calls “the Fediverse,” which is effectively the app’s homepage. It contains content from across the platform’s servers in a more general feed.

Like Bluesky, Mastodon offers no paid ads. Unlike Bluesky, it may never offer advertising. It’s a non-profit with decentralized infrastructure. It does not have the same onus to deliver value to shareholders that other social platforms do.

The platform is smaller than Bluesky and, somewhat concerningly, isn’t growing. Its total user count is about 10 million with about 900,000 active users, down from a peak of over 2 million. There has been renewed interest in the platform through early 2025, so it’s possible that Mastodon can break out of its death spiral and become a serious contender.

Marketing on Mastodon: Talk nerdy to me

When investigating Mastodon, it became immediately clear that this is a more technical audience than other platforms. Its initial pitch is quite complex. The “Fediverse” spans all Mastodon servers, but each server is also distinct and independently operated. There’s a Mastodon website at https://mastodon.social/, but there are also regional websites that provide the same exact Fediverse feed, like https://mstdn.ca/. Neither of these are the main Mastodon website, which is https://joinmastodon.org/. Instead of a single official app, there are dozens of competing mobile apps used to access the platform.

This is not a straightforward experience for new users. In fact, it’s downright confusing. It is surely an obstacle to greater adoption.

We see that bear out in the app’s low population as well as the nature of its content. A quick scroll of the Fediverse shows a left-wing tilt, but also a technical slant. Multiple popular posts discuss open source software, Linux programming, and other “nerdy” topics.

If there’s a case for marketing engagement on Mastodon, and that’s a big if, it should probably focus on direct engagement with a technical audience. It may be a great place to connect with IT professionals and engineers if you’re hiring. It could be a good place to pitch products and services to like-minded individuals. It is unlikely to be an effective spot for conventional marketing campaigns.

Threads: it has the numbers, but does it have the engagement?

When Meta launched Threads, it gave itself a crazy head start over other X competitors. It promoted the app to its massive Instagram userbase—some two billion users! With just a couple taps, any Instagram user could install Threads and sync their Instagram account. As a result, Threads boasts a user count of over 200 million, including 30 million daily active users. This makes it by far the biggest competing platform of the choices analyzed.

It’s not all good news, though. The average engagement time per active user is just three minutes per day, barely enough time to make a post let alone engage with others. Its usage peaked almost immediately before falling by 79% to just 10 million daily active users. It’s since recovered partially to 30 million and is once again experiencing growth.

Threads’ launch was underwhelming beyond the sheer volume of new users in the first week. Though many signed up for the app, they found there was nothing to do there. The platform felt deeply limited, especially given the audience it courted. What did Instagram users get out of a simplistic, largely text-based sharing platform? For many users, it felt like a step backward.

Today, the content ecosystem on Threads is fairly diverse. Without logging in, the main feed is a general mix of everything from recipes to soccer highlights. Political content is interspersed, but by my count less than 20% of posts were political. A far cry from Mastodon and Bluesky!

Marketing on Threads: A more familiar experience

B2B marketers may find a lot to like about Threads. Despite its up-and-down engagement record, Threads is more moderate, more general interest, and less reactive to X and its audience. Right from the get-go, Threads drew users from Instagram rather than relying on disgruntled X’ers to build a user base. The result seems to be a less politicized platform. For marketers, there’s a huge added bonus: while Threads is currently ad-free, it will eventually be integrated into the Meta Ads ecosystem. This provides opportunities to build audiences across the Meta network, share data between campaigns, and use tools familiar to most professional advertisers.

For now, Threads looks like the best for B2B marketers who want to run conventional campaigns on a platform that isn’t X. It is noteworthy that Meta is currently experiencing its own backlash due to unpopular changes to their moderation policy, as well as a number of “glitches” that seemed to suppress progressive topics in early 2025.

Whether or not this backlash results in a “Meta-geddon” is unclear. Meta products are so deeply baked into people’s lives that a mass exodus as seen on X is less likely. However, an increasingly privacy-sensitive general public may be inclined to seek alternatives to one of the most data-hungry businesses in the world.

Conclusion: whether you stay or go, your audience is fragmented

Researching this article exposed the extent to which platforms have polarized. Most platforms, including some that weren’t analyzed like Reddit, have an increasing level of cultural and political bias. Meta is perhaps the most neutral platform today due to the ubiquity of Instagram and Facebook. Musk has encouraged a right-wing culture on X. Reactionary platforms like Bluesky and Mastodon foster left-wing—sometimes very left-wing views.

As is often the case, there’s both challenge and opportunity to be found here. It’s challenging to coordinate campaigns across many channels. It’s challenging to evaluate things like brand risk when each platform has such different underlying ideologies. What plays well to the X crowd might disgust the Bluesky crowd and vice-versa.

On the other hand, there’s a great opportunity to learn about the evolving DNA of each of these channels and use it to enhance marketing performance. When our audience lives together in one big community, it can be hard to speak to some segments without bothering others. Now, our audience comes pre-segmented. We can flavour our campaigns based on the platform; use the language each segment of our customer base resonates with best.

B2B marketers owe it to themselves to consider each of these current and emerging platforms. Take a little time and immerse yourself in each. Get past the news headlines and hype. You’ll find that opportunities abound in this increasingly complex ecosystem.