Announcement: Change to The Mane Land’s Approach to Live Updates on Social Media

Here at The Mane Land, we were able to build a rather sizable following on social media early in our growth. We quickly surpassed a thousand followers while we were still a free independent WordPress site with just a few contributors posting about one new story per day. This helped us get the attention of SBNation, which we eventually joined.

When we joined SBNation’s roster of blogs, we quickly rose up the ranks to one of the most followed MLS team-specific accounts on Facebook and Twitter (especially the latter). We always had great engagement on Twitter, with mixed results on Facebook.

With all of that said, we take the relationship with our social media followers seriously, because our readers have helped our growth on those channels (and vice versa), and we know who our friends are. We’ve met a lot of our Twitter followers in person over the years, and we value those times we’ve spent with you.

All of this serves to preface that we’ve decided to change some things up, although it’s nothing too radical. Starting Friday, March 28, TML will no longer be live tweeting matches on Twitter (sorry, I’m still never going to call it X, because that’s dumb). We will also be reducing our already dwindling presence there. I want to emphasize that we are not deleting our account. We will continue to post new stories to the artist formerly known as Twitter. But that’s about all we’ll be doing there. This week’s OCB game will be the last match for which we’ll provide live updates on Twitter.

We will be moving all of our live game coverage to our Bluesky Social account.

Please note: This move should in no way be construed as a political one. There are several factors at play, and while some of our writers may not share political alignment with Twitter’s owner, that is not why I’ve chosen this course — with the support of the TML staff. If this was a political choice, we’d simply delete the account and quit using the platform entirely.

Once upon a time, Twitter used to drive a decent-ish (but, if I’m being honest, never great) amount of engagement to our website, which we could see in our analytics. It was also a place where we could engage with our followers, exchanging thoughts on the club and its players, and occasionally arguing a little bit about those topics.

Before you could simply buy a blue checkmark, Vox Media assisted us in getting vetted by the former ownership, which helped legitimize us as a reliable outlet covering Orlando City SC. That too helped us grow our follower base, but it all went away when the current owner decided to overpay for the platform and tried to monetize it by letting anyone buy a blue checkmark, flooding the non-checkmarked accounts with ads. That was the start of when we began seeing Twitter become less useful as a marketing tool for TML and when it started driving a lot less traffic to our website and podcasts.

Most of our post engagement on Twitter has dried up because of people leaving (or spending less time on) the platform. More likes and retweets are coming from bot accounts than ever before. Typically, we have been seeing a high percentage of post likes coming from obvious bot accounts. And it’s just not a pleasant place to be. There are far too many ads, and most of the “ads” we see in our feed aren’t advertising any service or product. They seem to be individual tweets boosted by…I don’t know, some algorithm, or maybe the account’s owner is actually paying for things like this to be boosted. Most, but not all, of those “ads” are political in nature, and many of the political ones feature easily disprovable lies.

But sometimes it’s random stuff like this:

When every fourth or fifth post is something like the above (or often something worse), it’s just not an enjoyable user experience. We’re not going to give the world’s richest man more money just to cleanse our timeline of it and have the old Twitter experience back (that’s the entire point of “premium,” to get us to pay to go ad free). That’s as valid a choice for a business model as any, I guess, but it’s not one we’re interested in boosting just to get things to go back to how they were.

Between the drop in engagement, the rise of unchecked bot activity, and the weirdness and frequency of the “ads,” it’s a place we’d like to spend less time. Again, we aren’t leaving. We’ll continue to let people on Twitter know when new stories drop. That’s always been our basic approach to Facebook, where we’ve never received a whole lot of engagement.

Bluesky Social, on the other hand, has been quite enjoyable in all the same ways Twitter used to be. With less than a third of the followers that we have on Twitter, our replies, likes, and reposts have been much higher on average over the past year, than those same posts on Twitter. Our podcast listeners submit far more questions there than on Twitter (but you can still ask on Twitter and we’ll answer them on the show). The Bluesky interface is slightly more clunky on desktop than Twitter (desktop is an important part of how I provide live updates during games), but it feels pretty much like Twitter used to. I have been trying to post on both Twitter and Bluesky for OCSC games, but doing both is problematic and more than a little stressful. By limiting live updates to Bluesky, it’ll make things easier for those of us doing this in our spare time for no real financial gain. I’m not asking the staff to start Bluesky accounts, but some of our writers already have them.

Our ask of you on this subject is…nothing. If you’re not on Bluesky, and you decide you don’t want or need another social media account, that’s a valid choice. If you want to join us on Bluesky, we’d love to see you. Our posts about our stories will be (and have been for some time) identical on both platforms (and on Facebook). The only change will be that we (mainly I) will spend more time on Bluesky, less on Twitter, and our live game coverage will be on Bluesky. You can still @ us on Twitter if you like. We may just be a bit less responsive.

Things change, especially technology and social media. Some of you remember MySpace. Or even AOL. It’s entirely possible that a future Twitter with better control of bots and ads may one day be worth egaging with more often again. That’s another reason for us not to delete the account.

At The Mane Land, our main reason for existence continues to be that we love telling the stories of our favorite MLS, NWSL, and MLS NEXT Pro soccer teams. That won’t change — even if the way we promote those stories does from time to time.

Feel free to reach out with any comments or questions you have. And, as always, thank you for your support over the last 11 years.