Threads and Bluesky are very much the talk of the town for news publishers right now.

As platforms focus their attention on driving engagement, there is still a huge appetite within the industry for social networks that allow them to drive referral traffic as simply as possible with link posts.

By the end of 2024, Threads reported 300 million monthly active users (MAUs). Meanwhile, by early 2025, Bluesky had grown to 30 million users in only a year. These numbers are far short of Facebook’s 3 billion MAUs. But, for publishers with the time and resources to commit to growing a presence on the platforms, both have a lot to offer.

Time and resources, however, are key. Many publishers we’ve spoken to talked at length about the challenges that come with adding yet more social media platforms to an already packed social strategy. Growing an audience and producing traffic doesn’t happen overnight. For those already stretched thin, dedicating the necessary attention was challenging.

The consequence was that it became very difficult for social media teams to demonstrate an ROI to management, leaving Threads and Bluesky on the periphery of publishers’ social media strategies. This despite the fact that, increasingly, the diversification of content distribution is becoming an important aim within the industry.

The importance of share volume to performance

In the months since publishers have been able to post to Threads and Bluesky from Echobox, we’ve seen the impact social automation can have — not just on share volume but also on performance.

On Threads, for instance, analysing pageview data from our publishers before and after Threads automation went live, we saw enormous increases in pageviews, tracking closely to increased share volume.

With an average weekly share volume of 24 posts over a period of nine weeks, a well-known U.S. publisher (Publisher 1 in the graph) achieved around 15,000 pageviews per week. In the three weeks after this publisher switched to automating shares to Threads, the number of shares and pageviews increased exponentially — up to an average of 261 shares per week and 69,000 pageviews.

This was a pattern we found repeated itself throughout our data: The greater the volume of shares, the greater the number of pageviews.

In the case of Publisher 2, a large public television company in Europe, average weekly share totals on Threads went from around 15 to 141, with weekly pageviews increasing from around 7,500 to more than 70,000.

Automation for Bluesky through Echobox happened slightly more recently than Threads. Therefore, we are still analysing the data. So far, however, the trend looks broadly identical.

Not all automation is equal

A  news publisher who posts more is likely to generate more pageviews. This is true to an extent.

The other side of this equation is penalisation. We know social media companies use algorithms to promote certain kinds of behaviour. It’s been known for some time that Facebook, for example, penalises publishers for over-sharing. Whether it’s posting too much, too frequently, or too close together, eventually publishers reach an unspoken limit beyond which they are being penalised.

This is a practice that is widespread throughout the industry, although each platform will configure their algorithms differently. Accordingly, optimal share volume, timing, and frequency will vary, and Threads and Bluesky will be no exception.

Complicating matters even further is the fact that optimal sharing patterns will often vary from publisher to publisher. What may be the ideal cadence of shares for one publisher is unlikely to be the best for another and may even be detrimental.

Increasing share volume is vital for success on Threads and Bluesky then. But developing an individually tailoured share pattern is crucial to maximising performance.

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