This week, Meta has launched Threads, under the umbrella of ‘Instagram’. Threads is a text-based social app, and Meta’s answer to Twitter.
Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has talked openly about the “volatility” and “unpredictability” under Musk providing Meta with the opening to compete.
How does it work?
Users can easily sign in with their existing Instagram account, and are automatically given the ability to follow their Instagram contacts on the new platform. (Note that Threads is currently unavailable in the EU, due to tighter privacy laws).
This network effect has resulted in a huge initial influx of users, not usually possible with a new platform (as seen by competitors Mastodon and Bluesky).
Users who have signed up are even given a temporary badge on their profile to showcase early adopters of the platform.
A month in, the user count is estimated to be around 118 million, and engagement on the app has reportedly slowed - which is almost expected after the initial hype.
What does this mean for advertisers?
On the organic side, initial signs point to brands picking up their handle via their existing Instagram presence, and maintaining a similar content strategy to their existing Twitter approach.
From a paid perspective, while no official details have been provided yet, we fully expect Threads to soon become a part of the wider Meta inventory stack as a selectable placement within Ads Manager. As with Instagram, Meta will aim to replicate formats across their different apps as much as possible to scale existing campaigns and use the additional customer data to further power the algorithm.
The first user to reach a million followers, Mark Zuckerberg has commented on the app's future regarding monetisation and ads:
Overall this seems to be much more of a brand safe alternative to Twitter. So keep an eye out, observe and there may be potential to adopt your current Twitter strategy to Threads.
Croud’s Paid Social Manager Ananda de Abreu comments, “Meta is still one of the easier platforms to navigate and, since users can sign up from their Instagram accounts, it brings an advantage from a targeting perspective - they're not starting from ground zero”.
What we’ll be doing
At Croud, we’ll be keeping a close eye on this and robustly testing the effectiveness of new placements and formats as they become available.
Mosseri has announced a few new features for the platform already, including these updates on the 25th of July:
Even at its peak, Twitter had struggled to effectively monetise advertising from a performance perspective. It’ll be interesting to see if Meta succeeds with a similar app, given the power of their existing ads ecosystem.
How far Threads scales remains to be seen. This will ultimately hinge on whether Twitter provides enough of a reason for users to remain on both platforms or stick with Twitter as their challenges continue and Threads gains some momentum.
