4 Burning Qs About Threads

WELCOME TO THE THREADS ERA

It’s fair to say that Meta’s Threads launch has been a success. The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, Threaded that the network had already crossed 100 million users on Sunday, just 5 days after its launch.

That makes Threads the fastest growing app in history, by a lot.

For context, it took Twitter 5 years to hit that same number. Although that’s a bit of a cheap shot because Twitter launched in a very different time and had to literally teach people how to post a social media update.

How long did it take others to hit the 100 million mark?

• ChatGPT: 2 months
• TikTok: 9 months
• Instagram: 2.5 years

The genius in the launch of threads, and their unfair advantage, has been how easy it is to move your account, and your network, over from Instagram. One of the most difficult points of friction when convincing people to try a new social network is the cold start problem: Your feed is empty, and you feel ridiculous posting to nobody.

Meta solved that problem with the Follow All button. When you sign up for Threads, it links to your Instagram account and gives you the option to instantly follow everyone you had been following on IG. A lot of people have been clicking that button, which means that pretty much all of us have a solid group of people to talk to just hours after we sign up.

So, what is Threads? Is it just a clone of Twitter?

Despite (or because of) its unexpected mega-launch, Threads has entered into its awkward growth phase where it hasn’t really figured out what it is yet. If we’re being honest, most of the conversations on Threads right now are about the app itself, or about how relieved people are to be free of Twitter.

Mosseri says that Threads isn’t the same as Twitter because they’re not actively trying to create spaces for news and politics. Instead, the way he’s described it sounds more like Reddit, where people can connect on topics that they care about.

The reality is that none of the big social networks ended up being used in the way that their founders had originally intended. Let’s take a look at a few of the biggest examples:

• Twitch was a live video stream of people’s daily lives — it’s now the world’s largest streaming platform for the gaming community
• TikTok was a lip-syncing channel where people could make their own music videos — now it includes everything from #BookTok to the Grimace Challenge
• Instagram was a location check-in app — now it’s where people share their photos, videos, and stories

Despite the fact that we don’t really know what Threads is going to be in the future, we do know how it’s different from Twitter today.

Here are a few notable ways that Threads is different from Twitter:

• No DMs
• No GIF integration
• No paid tier (ie. Twitter Blue)
• No Explore feed
• No Spaces (live audio)
• No edit button
• No ability to see the Threads that an account has Liked
• No full access via a web browser
• No hashtags

What does Threads have right now that makes it better, or interesting?

• High quality, high resolution photos on all devices
• Faster loading feeds
• Beautiful looking carousels
• Much better support for images of all ratios
• Smart, simple user experience touches, ie. click an account’s profile pic to follow

Another fun little feature is that when you sign up, your IG account will get a new field below your profile pic with your account number. That number shows where you were in the order of sign ups. FYI: Zuck is #1, Mosseri is #2.

There’s another major point of differentiation that may not seem like a big deal right now, but may become the thing that makes it stick: The Fediverse. (If that already sounds too nerdy for you, feel free to scroll to the next section).

What is the Fediverse, and why should you care?

It’s a poorly named and inadequately understood technology, but the essence is that our online presence shouldn’t be stuck to any one company’s servers. Instead, an organization called ActivityPub has made it possible for users to transport their data in and out of any participating social network.

An easy (if imperfect) way to think of the Fediverse is like email: we can choose to use Outlook or SuperHuman or Gmail as our interface, but the actual messages exist in a central server that will live on even if we choose to switch to a different service.

The problem they’re trying to solve is that, right now, individual companies have way too much power. They lock us into their platforms, then serve us ads that we may not like, add features we didn’t ask for, and are forced to make moderation decisions that we may not agree with. In a world where users could flow seamlessly from one service to the next without losing our connections or history, we’d be free to choose the platform that best aligned with what we were looking for.

As of today, Threads doesn’t support ActivityPub’s Fediverse model, but according to Meta’s announcements, it’s a central part of how they’re thinking about the future of the app.

The only remaining question is the big question that everyone is asking themselves right now:

Should my brand be on Threads right now?

Maybe. I know that’s not the neat and tidy answer that you want to hear, but I’ll try to make the quickest, most compelling case in both directions, and then you make the call for yourself:

Case for Yes:

There is an absolute rush happening right now where there are 100 million+ people on there looking for anything interesting to engage with, and there is not even close to enough content to satisfy them. Very soon, if Threads becomes a mainstream app, it will be packed full of amazing content (ie. Instagram) and it will be nearly impossible to break through and get noticed. If there was ever a time to seize an opportunity to grow an audience, this is it. All of the biggest social media success stories happened in the early days: RedBull on YouTube, Glossier on Instagram, Duolingo on TikTok. These opportunities don’t come around very often, and we’re right at the beginning of the next one.

Case for No:

First: TikTok exists.

And Second, it took Twitter 10 years to get to where it is, and even then it is extremely difficult to justify Tweeting as a productive use of your time and energy. Given all of the other opportunities that exist, it makes no sense to gamble your scarce time on an app that may not even be around in a few months.

The decision should come down to what your brand is best at, how you can best connect with your community, and where your level of risk tolerance lies.

Want to learn more?

• Here’s a basic, but solid, primer from TechCrunch
• Some backstory and context in an article from the NYTimes
• A conversation with Adam Mosseri on launch day on the Hard Fork podcast

TWITTER’S NEW CEO’S NEW PLANS

HOW LINDA YACCARINO IS GOING TO TRY TO TURN THE SHIP AROUND

First, she’s going to have to figure out how to stop the ship from sinking.

Twitter is facing a 70%+ drop in revenue, constant product errors, increasing hate speech, an inexplicable weekend where it limited the number of Tweets that people could load, and now a direct attack from one of the world’s best-resourced and most capable competitors. It’s hard to imagine a bigger challenge for an incoming CEO, and all that is before we even talk about the owner who shows no signs of letting her lead without his constant interruptions.

So with all of that as a backdrop, what did Yaccarino lay out as her plan?

1. New, full-screen, sound-on ad offering, that will place promotions into Twitter’s scrollable video feed, which first launched last October, and has since been used by basically nobody
2. Luring celebrities back to Twitter (somehow)
3. Hiring more people

I’ll be honest, when I saw the announcement that she had released her plan, I didn’t have high hopes I’d be convinced that she could make real progress, and now I’m convinced that Twitter is screwed.

To be fair, she has a long and successful career as a high performing advertising executive, so of course her plan is going to hinge on ads, but to think that they are going to stop the exodus of users and put out the flames by making a new ad unit available is so absurd that it feels like parody.

Prediction: By holiday 2023, Twitter has been relegated to the realm of MySpace, BeReal, Tumblr, and Parler as social media networks that still technically exist, but are only used by a handful of people who refuse to let go.

GOOGLE CLARIFIES WORD COUNT, ONCE AND FOR ALL

NO, THERE IS NOT A MINIMUM NUMBER OF WORDS FOR SEO

Search engines are a bit of a black box. The exact ways that they rank and promote content is a necessarily well-kept secret, but that ambiguity has created a lot of space for hucksters to sell their “expertise.

This week, one of the most widely repeated untruths about search engine-friendly content has been flatly refuted by the source itself.

For years, SEO audits would often include a section that listed all of the pages on a website with less than 300, 500, sometimes 800 words as being “thin” and therefore inadequate as a destination for search engine traffic. The obvious implication was that the client should really hire someone to come in and bulk up the content to therefore make it more “SEO-friendly.”

Google has clarified that word count is not now, nor has it ever been, a ranking factor and that pages with only a few words that attract a ton of traffic and links will always outperform even the best written long-form pages that don’t get as much attention.

So, the good news for all of us who are concerned about our website’s SEO is that great content wins, no matter how many words, and that by simply creating stuff people love, we will always outperform content that is only technically optimized for web crawlers.

TIKTOK RE-INVENTS CROWDSOURCING

“CREATIVE CHALLENGE” FORMALIZES USER-GENERATED AD CONTENT

If you remember the original concept of the site 99Designs, then this will be familiar to you: A brand puts out a creative challenge to the internet, talented creators submit their versions, then the brand chooses one that will get paid and used in the campaign.

It’s a clever idea that’s fraught with flaws, but that just depends on how it’s used.

There is no shortage of creative people out there making stuff for TikTok, and this new tool makes it easy for brands to reach out to those people and compensate them for their work. At the same time, in order to even be considered to receive compensation, many more creators will have to do work, offer their creativity, and inevitably leave empty handed.

The optimistic view is that the choice lies with the creators themselves, and they are going in with their eyes open, but even that take leaves open the reality that we are devaluing and commoditizing creative labour in favour of making marketing executives’ lives just a little bit easier.

There will no doubt be some great work that comes out of this tool, and I can certainly see it being a fun way to engage with an audience that loves your product, but at what cost?

Read more about Creative Challenges

A FEW FOR THE ROAD

MORE NEWS TO KEEP YOU ON THE CUTTING EDGE

• Linkedin changed its algorithms to be more helpful — here’s what’s new
• The FTC changed its guidance on brand endorsements and disclosure — if you work with influencers you’ll want to read this one
• Facebook makes it possible to use organic user-generated content in your ad campaigns — similar to TikTok’s announcement, without the contest part

Written by Conner Galway, Junction Consulting