On July 5, Meta announced the launch of Theads, its new social network that monetizes Instagram’s base of more than 2 billion daily active users worldwide. A bet by Mark Zuckerberg’s conglomerate to capitalize on her enormous social capital.
Threads is an app created by the Instagram team to share “what Instagram does best”: photos and videos, with text.
The app, say its creators, seeks to offer an “open and friendly” space for real-time updates and public conversations. For everyone, whether they are content creators or general users.
In this column, I will comment on the topics that I can share up to now given the very short run of this application which, according to Zuckerberg himself, achieved 10 million subscriptions within seven hours of its launch and closed its first 24 hours with more than 30 million users. At the time of publication of this article, this growth will have been exponential.
- How Threads works
- The call of compatibility
- The end of Twitter?
- Threads and influencer marketing
How Threads works
After downloading the app, you can log in with the user’s Instagram account, whose profile is also used in Threads.
Posts can have texts of up to 500 characters and include links, photos and videos up to 5 minutes long.
As with the base platform, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends that the user already has on Instagram, as well as others suggested by the algorithm, following the powerful line of recommendations of new accounts to discover that Instagram already uses.
Meta adds as part of its offering that the user can easily share a Threads post to their Instagram story or do it as a link on another supported platform.
The call of compatibility
Threads is the first Meta app designed to support an open social networking protocol.
In its official announcement, Meta says it plans to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web.
This would make Threads interoperate with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress, allowing for new types of connections not possible in most social apps today.
The proposal is that people using compatible apps can follow and interact with people on Threads without having a Threads account, and vice versa. This flexibility, says Meta, will be “the beginning of a new era of diverse and interconnected networks” and what will shape the “future of the Internet” with a decentralized approach that helps people find their community, no matter what application they use. .
The end of Twitter?
The app appears to work much like Twitter, emphasizing public conversations where people are free to choose spaces that align with their values.
In fact, Meta promotes its new application as an “open and friendly” space in a clear allusion to the hostile environment of Twitter, which since it was bought by Elon Musk has undergone transformations that its users have not liked and that include changes in the algorithms. to favor certain publications and limitation of time of use for users, among others.
Some tech experts are already saying that Threads will be a “Twitter killer,” and Musk announced possible legal action by accusing Meta of stealing trade secrets by hiring former Twitter employees.
Kill Twitter or not, with the launch of Threads, Meta is not only monetizing its social capital from Instagram but also the internal chaos of Twitter and the discontent of its users.
Threads and influencer marketing
I never tire of saying that the only constant in social networks is change. But if something remains at the base of its evolution, it is the users’ desire for connection, where what prevails is communication between a community of similar interests.
Two details I find interesting about the launch of Threads: one is that Meta in its official announcement refers to users as “creators”, winking at the solid positioning of Instagram, its anchor application for this project, as the platform of choice for marketing influencer digital.
The other is their intention to make it cross-platform compatible, which would make it more attractive to content creators and influencers so they don’t have to start from scratch on every new app. With this path paved, they would have the possibility to meet their community through different compatible platforms.
Digital marketing, always attentive to trends, will soon begin to implement strategies to bring brands closer with content that integrates these threads of conversations together with images and videos that can be shared on different platforms.
And perhaps we are at the gates of what Zuckerberg calls the “future of the Internet”, with a look that focuses on communities and their interests.
Ishmael El-Qudsi CEO and co-founder of Internet República, one of the main digital marketing agencies in Spain, since November 2011. He is also co-founder and CEO of the influencer marketing platform SocialPubli, founded in 2015, which currently operates in 9 countries.