Threads, the simple and stripped down text-based social network created through Facebook owner Meta, burst onto the scene in a bad week for then-rival still known as Twitter. He temporarily amassed a hundred million registrations, an enormous feat for a newcomer to the area, and was dubbed a “Twitter killer. “
However, in the current week, enrollment began to decline. As of Aug. 7, the number of other people using Threads hovered around 10 million on Android phones, up from 49 million when it was introduced the previous month, according to research company SimilarWeb. Is Mark Zuckerberg’s new adventure just a flash in the frying pan?It depends on your ability to face your biggest rival. And no, it’s not X, the old Twitter. Es TikTok. And the possibilities are not great.
“Mark Zuckerberg would possibly have been temporarily distracted in his fight with Elon Musk, but Meta’s real war is with TikTok,” said Insider Intelligence analyst Jasmine Enberg. “And Zuckerberg still has his back to watch. “
It’s true that before TikTok took on the role of virtual public square and “trendsetter,” Enberg noted, the role was played via Twitter. But many of the biggest trends now come from other people who have come of age in the TikTok era: Gen Z and even younger kids and teens. And like Facebook, Twitter use is also declining among teens, according to data from the Pew Research Center. As such, the text-based social media platform wouldn’t be very pleasant. the TikTok generation, where dances, makeup tips, quirky recipes, not to mention the total concept of deinfluencers, are spread through videos that are written.
Whatever the format, however, Threads’ biggest challenge is “being able to locate an exclusive identity outside of being an option for Twitter and out of the expansion of Instagram,” Enberg said.
At the moment, it is not transparent that it has one. The app has amassed a large initial user base, adding celebrities and well-known brands, exactly because it’s an Instagram extension. To sign up for Threads, you need an Instagram account, and it’s easy to transfer between the two. Instagram has more than a billion users (by some estimates, closer to 2 billion), and the app has lured users to Threads with notifications to sign up for their friends there.
The question is, what do you do once you’re on?So far, Threads’ user base is similar to Instagram’s, and vital accounts are predictable: celebrities, politicians, media, influencers, etc. It’s harder to locate posts originales. de people, unless the Instagram connections you’ve transferred are a chatty or small group. If you sign up without connecting a heavily used Instagram account, creating one just so you can sign up for Threads, the fun can seem impersonal and sterile. as the app invites you to stick to large and popular accounts that everyone also sticks to.
While many popular web celebrities rushed to sign up for Threads and temporarily amassed a lot of subscribers, it’s unclear how many of them return regularly. MrBeast, a popular YouTuber whose genuine calling is Jimmy Donaldson, has five million subscribers on the app. But he hasn’t posted in two weeks, despite being sent several TikToks, tweets (or posts on the site now called X) and an 18-minute video on YouTube, where he has 175 million subscribers.
Zuckerberg, on a recent conference call, said he was “optimistic” about Threads but said “there was a lot of work to do” for it to succeed to its full potential.
“It’s been kind of an abnormal thing in the tech industry that there hasn’t been an app for public discussions like this that has reached a billion people,” he said. “When I look at all the other social experiences, it turns out to me that there deserves to have one like this. “
Maybe so, but it’s not transparent that it’s Threads. As Zuckerberg said on the same call, Meta tried “a bunch of independent experiments over time” but, overall, didn’t have much luck. There’s Facebook, of course. But the company bought Instagram and WhatsApp, its other two successful apps. Perhaps the most important is Messenger, but even that as an internal Facebook service before installing a separate app.
“(It’s) wonderful that we have the ability to think about this, and I’m sure where we are,” Zuckerberg said. “But it’s going to be a long way to go. “