🧵Threads: one big win for Meta, but will the buzz last?
What happens when novelty wears off ⌛
"The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer."
--- Peter F. Drucker
🐦 Recap: Taking advantage of a rare gap in the social media space
A colleague of mine always says: social media is like a rented home. Things work great until the landlord decides to change all the rules. 🏠🔥If this is true, than Twitter has become a very unstable home since it was taken over by Elon Musk.
Since Musk took over Twitter, he instituted many controversial changes: the paid subscription for the blue check mark, the restricted post views, the bans to competitor social media accounts, and many other changes that caused dissatisfaction to Twitter users.
Since then (actually, even before), a lot of buzz started to circle around the idea creating a new Twitter. 🐦Substack launched its notes feature, and the frontrunner on that race, up to last week, was Bluesky (backed by Jack Dorsey, the founder it Twitter itself), which has 285k active users and 1.9M waitlisted.
But the company that was most openly looking to fill the gap for this was Meta. Since April, it was well known that Meta was developing the project for its new Twitter-like app, which was launched last week: Threads.
👆🏽 A win for Meta and the one-click onboarding
Threads has a lot of advantages.
First, it is owned by Meta, which is practically a social media institution with 2.3 billion active users. This avoids the Cold Start Problem. In other words, its easier to attract users when you already have them. Plus, we are living in a winner-takes-all economy, and whoever is large, powerful and well-funded has a natural advantage versus smaller tech players.
But, most importantly, its onboarding was made really easy: all you need to do is download the app, and it automatically connects to your Instagram account and follows all your contacts from there.
If Steve Jobs preached for a three-click rule for user adoption, then Meta nailed it with Threads and came up with a one-click onboarding: no need to create a new profile, no need to find whom to follow. Boom: a big win for Meta.
📲 Because of such seamless onboarding experience, Threads quickly became the most rapidly downloaded app ever, being downloaded 30M times in just 16 hours.
As of this writing, it has around 100M users (already 1/4 of Twitter’s 450M). That’s just 4% of Instagram’s daily user base, but still.. Threads is just a baby and is yet to enter Europe.
🤔 Kudos do Zuck! But will the novelty wear off? The questions that stand in the air
Threads’ adoption is very impressive. But what interests me the most is what comes next.
Old habits die hard, and its difficult to shift social media habits from day to night. Threads will need to prove retention beyond the current buzz, and that, in the past, has not gone well for other rising social apps. Clubhouse and BeReal had a good adoption traction, but did not survive in terms of retention.
🤖 Even ChatGPT’s traffic is down 10% from May to June, as the novelty wears off (and for the happiness of those who are skeptical about the AI buzz) .
What about the nature of Threads? Meta is selling it as ‘‘Twitter, but nice’’. But, for Twitter heavy users, Twitter’s ethos is all about being a little aggressive.
The users who are most active on Threads right now are the ones who need to be active across all social media channels, such as celebrities and influencers. But these creators also need an audience. For Threads to be successful, it needs to become as catchy for the bigger audience as well.
And finally: what about Gen Zeds, who do not even care that much about Instagram and are still much more hooked into TikTok? Time will tell..