Brands tested the service with jokes and jokes. But there are tired messages, like Cinnabon’s “I’m a Cinnamon Bun.” Crumbl Cookies, who has 263,000 followers, simply posted “hey,” followed by hundreds of cookie emojis. Wendy’s tried memes and mockery on Twitter, racking up 265,000 followers. This may all be good for brands (Pizza Hut’s missteps aside), but it’s not the kind of content that will keep people coming back to the app.
Among the deluge of brands, people are still trying to find their place and their tone on Threads. But without a sophisticated search tool, hashtags, or a timeline feed, it’s difficult for Threads to achieve its goal of becoming a place for “real-time updates and public conversations,” even if updates are expected.
Threads doesn’t yet offer advertising, but it could eventually become an attractive place for ad dollars. Instagram has a more brand-friendly reputation than Twitter, which lost 50% of its advertising revenue, according to Twitter’s owner. Elon Musk. With advertisers and everyday people fed up with hate speech and technical glitches on Twitter, Threads is in a good position to win both. But if his choice not to emphasize politics and current events could please brands, he risks losing people’s interest. And without people, a brand-friendly Threads won’t appeal to advertisers.
For influencers, Threads is another place to interact with their followers, but like brands, they’re testing the best ways to do so. YouTube star Mr. Beast already has 5 million followers on Threads and said he would give a Tesla to a random follower. Many have already seen some of their audience migrate to Threads from Instagram. “Now it’s about figuring out how to engage with them so they come back,” says Krishna Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of influencer marketing platform Captiv8. Threads may rely less on visual content, which could change how influencers post or who becomes one of the most followed accounts there. “We’ll just have to see what kind of content is created here.”
But some of the initial hype has already dissipated. According to SimilarWeb, an analytics company, Threads traffic peaked on July 7 on Android and has slowed since. The average time spent on the app also decreased, SimilarWeb found. A week after the app’s launch, Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, said that “growth, retention and engagement are way ahead of where I hoped we would be at this point” and that the focus was “not on engagement, which has been incredible, but getting past the initial peak.” Threads still ranks first for social media on the Apple App Store and second place for social media on Google Play.
As the dust around its launch settles, Threads faces a rough few months. If too much attention focuses around brands, influencers, and celebrities, it risks becoming a big broadcast channel instead of a conversation space, like Discord or Mastodon. Part of the appeal of connecting Threads to Instagram was that people could easily find their friends and family there. But for now, brands and influencers are enjoying initial successes. If their voices continue to be the loudest, they can also help define what Threads will become.
