By Arianna Crawford, The Social Media Explorer
The Big Valley Marketing New Platforms Series is a collection of posts that aims to introduce B2B marketers and communications to new social media platforms that may enable them generate new, innovative and uniquely meaningful approaches to reaching out to and interacting with their audiences. Adopting and maintaining new channels is a long-haul journey and will take time before any return on your investment. If you’d be interested in partnering with Big Valley Marketing, feel free to drop us a line at hireus@bigvalley.co.
Mastodon grew in popularity after Twitter’s hard pivot to X a couple of years ago. For those not steeped in the open-source community or the fediverse*, it can feel like the Wild West. However, Mastodon holds considerable promise for the right kind of B2B tech brand.
If developers or another highly technical audience is your jam, Mastodon might be something for you to consider.
On Mastodon, users join individual servers dedicated to specific interests and have their own moderation rules, similar to what you’ll find in a subreddit. These users can follow any account, even if they’re on a different server. There are no advertisements or recommendation algorithms, and very little brand self-promotion. But you will find increased data privacy for users.
Ultimately, Mastodon is specifically designed for community engagement and valuable, informative discussions, primarily among technical-leaning cohorts.
It’s the right fit for: A brand with a large developer audience or sufficient technical expertise (and time) to set up and manage their own server, as they could strike gold on Mastodon.
Ask yourself:
• Do I have the time and people to perform the technical maintenance, content moderation, and frequent activation Mastodon requires?
• Are developers and first movers among our primary audiences?
• Do we have experts ready to support or, ideally, drive engagement on Mastodon?
• Do I have a brand stance that is strong enough to hold conversation with experts?
Audience
• Size: ~ 1 million monthly active users, which is half of what it was in 2022.
• Behavior: Users are technical and looking for relevant, authentic information, and will get upset at “marketing speak”.
• Relevance: Very specific audience demographics that won’t apply to most brands.
Ease of Management
• Tools: There are no post analytics, algorithms, or paid solutions on Mastodon.
• Infrastructure: You must be able to set up and manage your own server.
• Moderation: With your own server, you make the content rules, BUT that often requires a front load of time and energy to maintain.
Content Strategy
• Uniqueness: In an uncluttered feed, you have direct attention on your content
• Fit: The tone and purpose of your content on Mastodon must be stripped of any marketing
• Transference: Mastodon supports the same post formats as other platforms, but that doesn’t mean posts that are successful here will be successful elsewhere, or vice versa.
Overall Impact
Mastodon is a haven for very specific, technical audiences. They are passionate, perceptive, and won’t tolerate being sold to. It requires a significant amount of very specific effort that cannot be easily copied and pasted to other platforms. So, for the brands that absolutely need to reach this audience and are willing to invest in this platform and the resources it would require, it could work well for you. For most brands, however, Mastodon shouldn’t be a priority.
