THREADS: THE TWITTER KILLER?
Meta has taken a stab at stealing Twitter’s crown for best short-form social platform amidst a flurry of controversy surrounding Elon Musk’s now-controversial social giant Twitter. But what is Meta’s new platform, Threads, and is it a Twitter killer? Here’s what you need to know.
According to Meta, Threads is ‘Instagram’s text-based conversation app’ and according to the description on the App Store, it will be a place where: “…Communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favourite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”
This sentiment has obviously hit its mark, with 5 million users signing up within the first 4 hours of its launch. Outwardly, the platform looks similar to every other short form social channel out there. Its resemblance to Twitter and Mastodon is uncanny, unsurprising and has lead to a flood of copy and paste based memes on Twitter.
This isn’t unexpected. After all, it is designed to be a direct competitor to these two phenomenally successful platforms and in this regard, Threads is to Twitter what Adidas is to Nike and from our perspective on this brand new channel, we suspect that there won’t be much overlap in audiences and an age division is likely.
Something marketers should be wary of when directing clients and targeting audiences. Why? Well, given the age of the average Twitter user (25-34) according to The Social Shepherd we can more or less certain that younger people (18-24) who already favour Instagram messenger and TikTok to express themselves and communicate will almost certainly favour Threads over Twitter especially with the introduction of a paid tier system on the channel.
The Future of Threads.
Interestingly, when signing up to Threads, we noticed something rather interesting, a little paragraph all about something called ‘The Fediverse’. We’ll look past the name for a moment, although we can be sure that the conspiracy theorists will be having a field day discussing the similarities between ‘Fediverse’ and ‘federal’ in the US and joining the dots between Meta’s turbulent history with sharing data with the US government but that’s a blog for another day. On the Fediverse, the paragraph you read upon joining Threads reads: “Later versions of Threads will work within the Fediverse a new type of social media network that allows people to follow and interact with each other on different platforms such as mastodon”.
Is this the unification of social platforms? If so, we can’t help but think back to when – about this time last year – we at Siren discussed the fantastically underwhelming Metaverse and spoke about how it had fallen flat. However, with Threads collecting 10 million users on launch day (including most of team Siren) and the possibility of a completely integrated social media sphere, we might have to eat our words! Regardless of the future of Threads, for now at least, the platform is certainly making waves as users are eager to explore what the service has to offer.
