Bluesky Profile 101: How to Attract Followers and Grow On Bluesky

As one of the latest growing social media platforms, many users are jumping on the chance to build their account up and grow on Bluesky. This is easier said than done. The key to growing on Bluesky starts with creating a credible, high-quality, and engaging profile. However, most users fall short in creating a profile that can actually attract followers. We’ve created this step-by-step guide that shows you how to create an effective Bluesky profile which hooks users in and keeps them scrolling. From a recognizable brand and display name to engaging content and striking visuals, keep reading to learn more about building an effective Bluesky profile!

Growing With Your Bluesky Profile

Choosing a Display Name on Bluesky

If you want to grow on Bluesky, it’s vital that your display name is simple, memorable, and accurately reflects your content. Here’s some key notes to keep in mind when choosing a display name:

Use Your Name or Business Name: Using your own name or your business name is a simple way to accurately reflect who you are and what you do.
A Short Name: The shorter the better! A display name like “FlavorFeast” is much more memorable than a name like “ReadMyCookingGuides732”.
Use An Old Username From Other Social Media: If you have another social media account, such as a Twitter or Instagram, use the same user as you do there for Bluesky. This will help users on Bluesky recognize you!
If possible, you should avoid:
- Names that are hard to read
- Names that are not relevant to you
- Including numbers in your name.
- Names that make you appear spammy or unprofessional.
- Names that could make people mistake you for another account (i.e. HootSweet can be mistaken for HootSuite).

How to Create the Best Banner for Bluesky

Just like your display name, your banner needs to look professional and match with your branding. There are many templates available online that make achieving a good-lucking profile banner simple. Here’s some tips for creating an amazing Bluesky banner:

Follow Default Dimensions: 1500 x 500 pixels is the recommended dimensions for your Bluesky banner.
Use High-Quality Images: The quickest way to scare someone away from your profile is with a blurry profile image. A high-quality image keeps your profile looking legit, credible, and professional.
Be Mindful of Desktop vs. Mobile Users: The banner will look different depending on if the user is scrolling on mobile or desktop. In mobile, your banner will be cut off at the sides to make it fit properly on phone screens. Ensure any important information is within the center to prevent annoying cut offs.
Use a Template: If you lack design talent, there are profile banner templates available for free online. Refer to sites such as Canva or Snappa.
Prioritize Simplicity: Don’t overload your banner with content that distracts from your profile as a whole. Something as simple as a single, expressive image in the back is enough to get your brand across. If you want to be more creative, you can use a quote, keyphrase, or logo instead of just your username, but only choose one to avoid cluttering.

Above you’ll see an example of a simple and effective Bluesky banner. This photo of a sleeping cat in a sea of clovers is simple, but it does an excellent job of immediately communicating what the profile is about. It demonstrates what a user can expect to feel while scrolling on their profile. Best of all, it looks stunning! This is a banner that makes users want to stay on your profile.

Now here is the not-so-great example. Above is a Bluesky profile with a banner that is mostly cut off. Not only does the image itself seem unrelated, it’s also difficult to recognize with very minimal visibility and doesn’t match the tone and look of their profile picture.

How to Create The Best Profile Picture for Bluesky

Whether it’s visiting your profile, sending you a message, or seeing your content on their feed – your profile picture is always there. For a lot of users, it’ll be the image that comes to mind when they think of you. Here’s how to create the best profile picture on Bluesky:

Ideal Dimensions: The recommended dimensions for your Bluesky profile picture is400 x 400 pixels, or a 1:1 aspect ratio.
Use Faces: It’s true that humans unconsciously seek out faces everywhere they look, their social media included! Is your face an important part of your brand? Add a high-quality photo of yourself as your profile picture! If your content is mainly about your dogs, make one of them your profile picture. If you’re an art account, a drawing you created of yourself or someone else is a perfect icon choice.
Visibility: Your profile picture needs to be recognizable. Users should be able to tell what they’re seeing, even if it’s just a small circle in the corner of their screen.
Match with Banner: To enhance the aesthetic appeal of your profile, use a picture that closely matches with the font, colour palette, and general vibe of your banner.

What Should My Bluesky Pinned Post Be?

Your pinned post is the first thing visitors see whenever they visit your profile. In other words, it’s your opportunity to make an immediate impression and show your worth as a content creator. Your pinned post can technically be anything, but that doesn’t mean it’ll be effective.

Good Content: Your pinned post needs to meet all the criteria of being objectively high quality, engaging content. That means it’s unique, appealing, showcases what you do, and is valuable to your target audience. Here are some examples of what that content would look like:
- An account dedicated to baking has a compilation video of them frosting different baked treats as their pinned post.
- An art account has a pinned post that displays a stunning artpiece and links to their portfolio.
- A digital marketing agency lists their best proven results with graphs that visually demonstrate their client’s growth as their pinned post.
Promotion: Many already successful Bluesky accounts use their pinned post to promote their products or services. You’ll often see people using it to advertise an event, an online course, a fundraiser.etc. Although an effective method for promotion, we recommend doing this only after your account has gained traction and credibility.

How to Write a Winning Profile Description on Bluesky

Your profile description should accurately describe who you are, what you do, and what users can expect from you. Unlike Twitter, Bluesky actually lets you use a decent amount of characters for your description, but that doesn’t mean you should! Here’s how to write a winning profile description on Bluesky:

Keep it Short and Sweet: No one is coming on your profile to read a paragraph of text in your description. Instead, give users a description that’s quick, easy-to-read, and gets straight to the point.
Incorporate a Hook: Start your description off with a sentence that immediately hooks users in. What this looks like will depend on your content and target audience. For an example, imagine you're a social media advertising professional. A great hook for you would look something like this: “I helped my client gain over 200% more followers in 2 weeks”.
Include Relevant Descriptors: Along with a hook, describe yourself succinctly using 2-4 word descriptors. These descriptors can be as simple as job titles, hobbies, core values, or specific passions. Think examples like: “Food Lover | Nutrition Specialist”, “Star Wars Expert | Galactic Space Nerd”, “Mental Health Coach | Overcoming Trauma”.etc
Avoid Words like NSFW and P*rn: “No NSFW” or “no p*rn” have become popular phrases for Bluesky creators to add to their description. You may think this lends you credibility in the eyes of other users, but people auto-scrape for words like these to avoid accounts of that nature.

Here’s examples of a good and bad Bluesky profile description:

Above is an example of an effective Bluesky description. The first hook concisely communicates what to expect from the account while also demonstrating what makes their content valuable. It also immediately prompts engagement, encouraging people to ask questions and get real, valuable answers. For what that first sentence doesn’t communicate, the following text communicates it instead. The creator provides several identifier important tags like “Biweekly podcast” and points users in the right direction to engage with “Ask questions at”.

The above image shows an example of a mediocre Bluesky profile description. It’s straight to the point, but at the same time, contains no real details about them or their content. The description is vague and unclear, leaving no concrete impression of what you can expect from the account. It also lacks an effective hook.

Your Follower to Following Ratio on Bluesky

How many people you follow versus how many people are following you matters on Bluesky. Avoid having a massive following number if you don’t have an equally as large number of followers. Having a ratio like “10 followers” vs. “3000 following” will cause users to see you as a spam account.

Think back to the last time you landed on a profile. Was the following and followers ratio in the top five immediate thoughts you had? Our guess is yes!

Creating Content for Bluesky

What Should I Create Content About on Bluesky?

There are truly no limits to what you can create content about on Bluesky (as long as they follow the app’s terms and conditions). To be successful, however, keep the following in mind:

Providing Valuable Content

Want to know the easiest way to make users enjoy and engage with your content? It’s all about providing information and resources that are actually valuable to your target audience.

We can't stress enough how important valuable content is. We have users ask us everyday how to improve their follow back ratio and this is almost always the answer!

Don't just create content for the sake of it. Be unique and creative. Add some emotion into the content. Analyze something differently than others already have. Ask for engagement to create a conversation about said topic. Just anything to add VALUE.

If you’re a mental health advocacy account, an engaging graphic showing how to respond to an anxiety attack is a perfect example of providing value in a way that resonates.

How to Create Threads on Bluesky

Bluesky only allows a limited number of characters per post, which is why threads are vital for those looking to share long-form content. Start with an initial intro post that hooks people in, and follow that with a series of replies that expand on that subject. Accounts will benefit from a mixture of short-form and long-form content in their content strategy. Here are some smart examples of how to use threads on Bluesky:

Avoid High-Risk Content If Possible

High-risk content is an all-encompassing term for any content topics known to easily annoy or irritate people. The most prime example of this is politics. Although rage bait content is an easy way to get people engaged, it's difficult to build a social media following when it's built off a foundation of hate and anger. Many users will block you. If politics is what you’re passionate about, we recommend a diverse content strategy that doesn’t solely rely on it.

Use Images

Images aren’t mandatory for creating a top-performing Bluesky post, but they do help you stand out in a sea of text-only content. It’s also a known social media fact that images garner more engagement than text posts on average. Don’t forget to ensure your images are relevant to the content, engaging, and high-quality.

Using Your Content to Boost Engagement on Bluesky

Even if your content connects with your intended audience, that doesn’t mean they’ll be prompted to engage on their own. When someone scrolls through social media casually, they’re not thinking about engaging with everything they come across, even if they enjoyed it. A little guidance and provocation goes a long way. One of the easiest ways to achieve this is by asking questions throughout your content to help spark a thought-provoking discussion.

Here are some classic examples of questions to ask to boost engagement:

“What do you think?”
“Has anyone heard about/seen this?”
“Am I crazy?”
“What should I do?”
“What would you do?”
“Has this happened to you?”
“Do you agree?”

How Often Should I Repost on Bluesky?

Ideally, limit your reposting. When users decide to follow you, it’s not usually so they can watch you repost content from other people. People are looking for the value you bring, not what someone else brings. This also doesn’t mean not reposting at all; reposting is an important functionality on Bluesky. Just avoid doing it constantly and letting your reposts bury the valuable content you’ve created. Limit it so that for every one repost, you also have at least one piece of original content to go alongside it.

Why Your Engagement Matters on Bluesky

What does the way you engage with others have to do with your growth as a Bluesky content creator? Think of your own engagement as planting seeds, seeds which will later turn into organic engagement from others on your own content. Let’s dive into how this works…

Who Should I Engage with on Bluesky?

Your Followers: When your followers are already active and engaging with your content, engaging back helps to build an even stronger connection between you and your audience. This will result in your followers interacting more and becoming more engaged with you.
Similar Content Feeds: Save feeds that contain content aligning with yours and interact with like-minded individuals there. This makes you an active member of the community while simultaneously spreading brand awareness. This also signals to the algorithm that this is content you want to see more of, leading to more relevant posts on your own feed and easy content creation down the line.

How to Block NSFW and Spam Accounts From Engaging on Your Bluesky Profile

NSFW and spam accounts are popping up all across Bluesky creator content. Despite Bluesky’s best efforts to remove these accounts from the platform, many slip through the cracks. If you want to stop seeing these types of accounts on your feed or engaging with your profile, there are a few manual and automated methods available.

Blocking Manually: The first is blocking manually. Although this can’t catch every account, it does signal to the algorithm that these accounts aren’t for you. This limits their appearance on your feed.
BluePilot: BluePilot is an automated Bluesky account management tool built to help businesses and content creators grow organically on Bluesky. One of the ways we do this is with our “Negative Keywords” and “Smart Unfollows”. Smart Unfollows automatically recommends accounts to unfollow that are flagged as spam or NSFW by Bluesky. This is an important functionality because Bluesky won’t inform you about accounts flagged on your profile. These negative keywords also allow you to have a little bit more control on what shows up on your feed. Avoiding certain accounts means you can avoid certain content!

Get NSFW and spam accounts off your Bluesky Account INSTANTLY.

How to Use Starter Packs on Bluesky

User-created starter packs are a pivotal part of boosting your visibility on Bluesky. New users turn to starter packs to curate their personalized Bluesky feeds, and being part of these could have a major impact on your account’s growth. Since users make their own starter packs, the only way to become a part of one is by engaging with the community, requesting to be added, or making and sharing your own.

Tools to Help Accelerate Growth on Bluesky

BluePilot

BluePilot initially started as an organic growth tool to help users gain real, relevant followers. BluePilot still does this using the Smart Queue feature. Smart Queue asks you to provide examples of accounts that align with your target audience, and will automatically suggest other accounts to follow that are similar. This streamlines the well-known follow for follow strategy, allowing you to effortlessly build your community.

Since its early beginnings, BluePilot has expanded its offerings to provide even more account management flexibility. This includes our latest Negative Keywords feature, and Smart Unfollows to easily unfollow accounts who are labelled spam, NSFW, inactive, or simply don’t follow you back.

Growing organically without a tool like BluePilot is possible, but it’s a slow and tedious process. Many up-and-coming creators work full-time while also trying to jumpstart their career on social media. Not everyone has the time to grow as quickly as they could be. That’s why BluePilot is designed to streamline your growth process, simplifying your account management and utilizing automated techniques to grow at an accelerated rate.

Ready to grow your Bluesky following? Get started today!

Clearsky

Clearsky is a tool that gives you detailed account insights. You can search for any account, including your own, to see a breakdown of who you’ve blocked, who’s blocking you, what lists you are in, and how you are labelled. These insights are a great way to determine how you’re viewed by other Bluesky users. You can use this knowledge to better tailor the content you create. For example, if you find yourself blocked by many users within your target audience, chances are you need a complete content overhaul or shift to a different direction. Insights like these help you make informed choices about your marketing and content strategies.