Meta launches Twitter rival Threads – what now?

It’s not the first, and probably not the last time, that Meta pulls its judo move and effectively clones its way to a new product, Threads – what now?

This time, Meta’s clone of the ailing Twitter even borrows a feature of the older microblogging platform for its name, in a tactic that even Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg notes on his rarely used Twitter.

Does it matter to marketing?

Not yet, but with the company specialising in the plumbing of advertising around social media, one suspects that advertising on Threads is no distant prospect. Some brands are already posting organic content to the site.

The appetite for testing will likely match user appetite for the app itself but given that a lot of companies big and small already use Meta’s ad manager, the same offer of convenience to users will presumably translate to advertisers too.

Twitter, meanwhile, was never a big source of ad spending compared to the Meta juggernaut and fulfilled an idiosyncratic role that garnered more passive attention than other platforms. Its user base, at 238m users, is small.  Should Threads continue to grow at this rate, it could match Twitter’s user base by the middle of this month – though that is deeply unlikely.

If you’re looking for more competition between the rival social networks, there’s also talk of a cage match between Musk and Zuckerberg, which appears to be the way that major celebrities go about settling differences these days. We’ll see.

What is/are Threads?

Threads is a “text-based conversation app” that accommodates posts of up to 500 characters along with hyperlinks, photos, and videos. Other users can reply, like, and share.

The difference and opportunity, according to Meta’s chief product officer Chris Cox speaking in an internal presentation, is to provide a platform that is safe, easy to use, reliable, and “sanely run”. In an Instagram post, Mark Zuckerberg talked about the idea of creating a “friendly public space for conversation.” Already the joke of a “friendly” rival to Twitter is being widely shared.

Zuckerberg, writing this time on Threads, says the app has received 30 million sign-ups in the first 24 hours of the app’s life.

Why now?

The app has been in the works since January, according to the same Cox presentation, but it was last week’s throttling event on Twitter that accelerated the launch of Threads.

Over the weekend, Twitter limited the number of tweets that users could see to 600 per day, to “address extreme levels of data scraping and system manipulation”, according to a tweet from Musk himself.

That the newly appointed CEO, Linda Yaccarino, didn’t immediately comment on the change, and that the company doesn’t have a functional comms department, perpetuated the aura of chaos that has engulfed Twitter over the last eight months.

Instagram back end

Threads uses Instagram infrastructure, offering an easy route for the photo-sharing app’s more than two-billion-strong user base to come to Threads using their existing login, and the chance to immediately begin following the same accounts as they do on Instagram.

This has allowed the new app to gain brisk momentum as it launched across iOS and Android devices in more than 100 countries around the world (but not the EU, where it faces legal uncertainty surrounding the forthcoming Digital Markets Act).

The regulatory question

More broadly, Meta’s plans for launching advertising services on Whatsapp have met resistance in the privacy-minded EU, given that the plans involved using data from Facebook and Instagram.

It appears that Threads poses some similar issues, not least the broad swath of identifying data that the app collects – a point that Twitter founder Jack Dorsey highlighted pre-launch – but also because it imports data from Instagram.

But the question of whether this is a commercial issue for the platform needs to be balanced against the deep popularity (and cultural importance) of Instagram, where this has hardly been an impediment to growth.

The ‘fediverse’

Not another something-verse… A new idea that Meta is talking up around Threads is its forthcoming compatibility with the open social networking protocol ActivityPub, allowing it to link to a ‘fediverse’ of servers using the same standards. Theoretically, this makes Thread interoperable with other apps on this protocol, including Mastodon and WordPress.

“Our vision is that people using compatible apps will be able to follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa, ushering in a new era of diverse and interconnected networks,” says a Meta news release. 

There are multiple questions here, but advertising is a critical one: in a fediverse, does advertising link to the content level, or does it exist at the level of the portal? With the user’s chosen app to access a wide swath of social media servers, is advertising bought and shown entirely separately from the content (and content moderation) operation? Should the excitement and growth trajectory continue, this will be fascinating to watch.

Story by SPT

Image: Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter