Meta launches Twitter rival ‘Threads’, with millions signing up in the first day
Earlier this week, Meta launched its awaited new social network Threads, positioned as a direct competitor to Twitter.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg was unsurprisingly one of the first on the platform, posting “Let’s do this. Welcome to Threads. ”. He also tweeted for the first time in over a decade with a meme, humorously pointing out the similarities between Twitter and Threads.
While it may be too soon to say for certain that Threads will be a success, the launch was certainly successful, with over 30 million users joining the platform. Meta’s history of successfully integrating competitors features, like Reels and Stories also gives optimism.
Threads has benefited significantly from being linked to Instagram – users sign up using their Instagram logins and are automatically offered to follow their existing Instagram followers. Practically, this has meant that virtually all users joining arrive on Threads with a network to engage with.
Instagram boasts over 2 billion users worldwide, eclipsing Twitter’s 400 million, and many Twitter users are present on Instagram.
Taking aim squarely at Twitter, Meta’s Chief Product Officer said there had been demand for a ‘platform that is sanely run’, and that the app was aiming for ‘safety, use of ease, reliability.’
For now, the platform is not available in the European Union, as it remains to be seen if it is compliant with EU regulations. It also doesn’t yet offer any advertising capabilities, with the Head of Instagram posting in a Threads thread that in the near term the focus will be to ensure a good user experience, while ads are “not the priority right now”, although once advertising is added it will be a very interesting alternative for advertisers to Twitter, considering the latter’s lacklustre offering in this space.
Our advice for corporate accounts is to take the time to see how Threads will develop, while its userbase grows and features are added. There is little first-mover advantage to committing resource now, especially considering that followers will be transported over from Instagram at the point of joining, and the long-term success of the platform may look likely but is not guaranteed.
Elon Musk places initial limit of 600 posts for non-verified accounts per day
There probably couldn’t be a better week for Threads to launch, as Twitter introduced another unpopular ‘feature’ a few days before.
To stop ‘data-scraping and system manipulation’, Musk has introduced temporary limits on the number of posts users can read per day, initially setting it at 600 for non-verified users although it was soon increased to 1000.
Musk claimed that ‘almost every company doing AI’ was using Twitter’s publicly available data to train their AI’s, forcing twitter to deploy additional servers to deal with the demand.
Users who pay the $8/month subscription fee for Twitter Blue can read up to 6,000 posts per day, leading some to believe that the decision was driven by a desire to increase subscriptions to Twitter Blue.
Users are going to have to decide between continuing on twitter, with or without Twitter Blue, or moving to a competitor. Bluesky and Mastodon have emerged as two potential successors to Twitter, with the former being run by ex-Twitter Chief Executive Jack Dorsey. The former saw a 25% increase in user base on Monday, whereas Mastodon has seen a drastic rise in members since Musk’s takeover of Twitter, with the userbase increasing by over 1000% since the beginning of 2023.
Despite the recent appointment of Chief Executive Linda Yaccarino, research company Forrester believes that this could worsen the already damaged relationship between Twitter and advertisers.
Twitter looking to sue Meta over Threads
In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, a Twitter lawyer has accused Meta of unlawfully misappropriating trade secrets, hiring ex-Twitter employees to develop Threads.
Elon Musk also spoke out about it, tweeting “Competition is fine, cheating is not.” At the same time many were quick to recall an earlier mocking tweet by Musk, where he said “I would like to apologize for firing these geniuses. Their immense talent will no doubt be of great use elsewhere.”
For its part, Meta claims that no former Twitter employees had been involved in developing Threads.
It remains to be seen if the potential lawsuit will impede Threads’ growth.