With 100 million users gained in just five days, Threads has become a social phenomenon like no other social media app — or app of any kind — in history. Meta’s new platform, a direct Twitter competitor, has quickly taken over, and if you’re on Instagram, you’ve likely seen the endless Stories flooding your feed of followers sharing their new profiles.
If you’re a small business or personal brand, you may feel slightly overwhelmed at the prospect of having to master yet another social media platform as part of your marketing strategy. That’s why we’ve created this quick and handy guide to navigating the new world of Threads.
What Is Threads?
There’s a reason that Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg both have their sights set on the octagon. After Musk acquired Twitter and promptly sent it into a downward spiral with Twitter Blue, daily view limits, and mass employee layoffs, Zuckerberg created a thinly-veiled direct competitor — Threads.
Threads operates extremely similarly to Twitter, where users can draft their thoughts in text and send them out to followers who can then like, reply to, repost, or quote their content. If that sounds familiar, it should; Threads’ layout is nearly identical to Twitter’s in every way. The main differences between the two platforms is that there are no DMs, hashtags, or ads on Threads, although they’re likely to come with future iterations of the app.
How Threads Works
Upon first downloading the app, you’re prompted to sign up through your existing Instagram account. If you’re creating a Threads profile for your business, make sure you create it through your business’s Instagram page, as the two accounts are visibly linked and can be accessed from one another’s profiles.
Another crucial link between the two platforms is that all of your Instagram followers will be transferred to your Threads account upon prompting. Everyone you follow on Instagram will also be followed by you on Threads (if they’ve joined the app), and all of your Instagram followers will automatically follow you when they create a Threads account. This is convenient for businesses with an existing follower base on Instagram; no one needs to start from scratch on Threads unless they choose to.
Once your followers and following are imported, you’re ready to tweet…or, thread? The verbiage surrounding the app hasn’t yet been completely established by its users, but this lends to the Wild West charm the app has while still in its infancy. No one quite knows the app’s full potential for growth and longevity, prevalence in social conversations, or marketing capability, but no matter what, you don’t want to be the last one to find out.
Using Threads for Your Business
Although the app’s user experience will undoubtedly evolve drastically as the engineers have more time to develop it (now with user feedback), Threads is currently very much a social network-based app. While social media platforms originated under the idea of “social networking,” Threads takes it back to its core by eliminating the opportunity to find accounts that are completely isolated from yours. There are no hashtags, no ads, and the search function is only by account — not keywords — so any content you see will be posted, reposted, or quoted from someone you already follow.
As such, Threads is currently best utilized as a way to engage and increase loyalty among your current audience, as opposed to growing your audience. While growing your audience and coming across new eyes is certainly possible — and is almost guaranteed to be a core aspect of the app in the future — the difficulty in finding entirely new accounts makes these early days of Threads a unique opportunity to deepen customer loyalty and lay the groundwork for word-of-mouth marketing.
When utilizing Threads, make sure that you have a clearly defined strategy. Establish a strong, distinctive, and consistent tone of voice for your account, and post consistently so that voice becomes increasingly familiar to your audience. Remember that Threads is inherently an interactive platform, with the name itself implying replies and threads of related thought. With this in mind, encourage engagement from your following at every turn. Pose questions, create polls, and generally elicit replies whenever and however possible while maintaining that clear brand voice. “What should our next seasonal color be? What is your favorite product of ours? Share a moment that shaped who you are. Reply with the next word in a made-up story and keep the thread going.” Encourage fun, thoughtfulness, and, ultimately, engagement in every post.
Although Threads has become one of the most quickly-adopted social platforms in history, it’s still in its infancy and yet to be shaped by its users. While Meta undoubtedly has a plan and Twitter provides an outline, users will ultimately be who decide how the platform functions and what its unique function in our digital society is. By adopting Threads early-on for your business, you can help shape that vision and become a thought leader, setting yourself up to best utilize whatever functionalities — and marketing opportunities — Meta enables next.
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