Loose Threads.
Oh, Threads. You were a brief, but bright light in the social media world when everything else seemed dark. Where did it all go wrong? With the fall of the platform formerly known as Twitter, everyone was looking for some sort of alternative to fill the hole. With new social media platforms popping up left and right, sometimes you need someone to give you the lowdown. That’s why Lucy, Community Manager, is here to share their thoughts on the current status of Threads.
I don’t blame you for thinking that Threads was going to be the next big thing, because it was! For a couple of days. In the first 2 hours of it’s release, “Zuck” himself announced that there had been 2 million sign ups, and hit 30 million users in 24 hours. Within the first week, at least 100 million people had signed up for the app. Way to hit the ground running.
Three weeks later, the app dropped from its peak of 49 million daily users down to 12 million. Here’s what I think happened:
It’s still very early days for the app. As of writing this, the following tab keeps popping in and out of existence with each update, there’s no efficient search feature, no way to keep track of trends, no ads, and most importantly, no chronological posts. It’s a glorified notes app, something you use to throw your first thought out into the ether and see some strangers thoughts in return – no one really asked for either. People got bored of its limited functionality and dipped. While it had a great start, it isn’t bringing anything new to the table, and is ultimately quite forgettable right now. However, Meta has said that they’re working to bring some new features to the platform, but is it too little too late?
The big starting numbers may be deceiving. The connection Threads has with Instagram gave it a head start, an almost unfair advantage. Transferring your information from one platform to the other was seamless, you didn’t need to manually put all of your information into boxes, and you weren’t giving a brand new, unknown company all of your data. People who didn’t have Twitter in the first place were signing up for it (and boy, could you tell). The ease of it all made it simple for people to sign up to avoid “FOMO”, or even just to claim the username that they’ve had since they were 13. Those numbers added up, so while there may be over 100 million sign ups, only a small portion of them are now actually active users.
Obviously, brands flocked to the Threads like moths to a flame. Again, thanks to the familiarity of it being a Meta owned platform, brands didn’t seem to be scared to take the leap. No one knew what worked yet, so everyone was trying to do something groundbreaking and see if it would stick in an attempt to go viral. “Quirky” brands quickly took over, leading to some, in my opinion, very inauthentic and somewhat jarring Community Management. This is not uncommon across brand accounts, often jumping into “silence brand” territory in a desperate effort to look cool. As a Community Manager myself, I know there’s a fine line between being authentic and feeling human. So when we also jumped onto the Threads train with our Partners’ accounts, we wanted to feel out the direction of the platform and the content on it before doing anything too wacky – after all, as Threads has thus far proved, it’s easy to fall into the disingenuous brand hole of trying too hard. This, mixed with the inability for users to filter out and see who they actually follow, may have driven people away from the app. With the following tab, you can at least choose who you want to see. Without that, a bombardment of brands you really don’t care about trying too hard to be funny, can be really off putting, and with the rise of people seeking authentic content through platforms like BeReal, it may have pushed them away. For a platform that doesn’t serve ads yet, it sure started to look like one. Yikes.
Here’s a TLDR: 1. The app is lacking the features it needs to retain users. 2. The simple sign up process heightened the user numbers at the start. 3. The whole app turned into a justification for the silence brand meme.
Threads is an app that was taken out of the oven too early. It needed a bit more time to bake and give the people what they actually wanted and needed. It’s very clear that its release was an opportunistic move while Twitter was falling, and Zuck wasn’t trying to hide it. He Tweeted for the first time in over a decade, and it was this.
Will Meta pull together its loose Threads in time to stay relevant? Or will it all unravel as a failed Twitter clone? Only time will tell.