---
title: 'Social Media Engagement: summer 2026'
link: https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic.html
source: martinfowler-com
published: 2026-09-09T16:21:00Z
updated: 2026-09-09T16:21:00Z
first_seen: 2026-09-09T16:31:40.482436471Z
authors:
- Martin Fowler
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---

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](https://martinfowler.com/feed.atom). 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](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2025-social-traffic.html)) 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)

1: See my [website tag page](https://martinfowler.com/tags/website.html) for material like that about my website behavior.

![](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic/retweets.png)

Figure 1: number of retweets for posts from June 16 to Sep 6 2026

![](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic/likes.png)

Figure 3: number of likes for the same period

I don't like using simple averages to compare things, [they are often misleading and blur useful information](https://martinfowler.com/articles/dont-compare-averages.html). 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.

![](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic/retweet-zoom.png)

Figure 4: Retweets, zooming 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:

![](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic/sources.png)

Figure 5: sources of traffic in 90 days prior to Sep 7 2026

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](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2025-social-traffic.html). Comparing the box plots for the retweets indicates how things have changed.

![](https://martinfowler.com/articles/2026-social-traffic/compare-year.png)

Figure 6: Compared retweets from posts in mid 2026 to early 2025.

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