Today Meta has released Threads, a new app created by the Instagram team, which has been released to rival Twitter. With Elon Musk’s takeover at Twitter bringing so many unpopular changes, Mark Zuckerberg’s latest offering seems to be capitalising on that recent downfall.
As a consumer PR agency it is important for us to stay on top of the latest trends in social media, so let’s take a look at what we know about Threads so far.
What is Threads?
As described by Instagram, Threads is designed for ‘sharing text updates and joining public conversations’. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include photos, links, and videos up to 5 minutes in length.
You can log in using your Instagram account which means you will have the option of following the same people that you follow on Instagram, giving you a ready-made followers list, which is likely to increase if more of your Instagram friends sign up.
According to Instagram, ‘Your feed on Threads includes threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet’. So at the moment there is no separate feed of only people that you follow, but this could be added later.
A selling point of the app is to ‘enable positive, productive conversations.’ With this is mind, you can control who can reply to you or mention you within Threads. Like Instagram you can add hidden word filters so you can hide replies with specific words you don’t wish to see. You can also unfollow, block, report or restrict a profile.
Where is Threads available?
Threads is currently launching in the UK, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and 100 other countries, but will not be available to EU countries at the moment due to the Digital Markets Act.
Threads also has plans to become compatible with ActivityPub, which is an open social networking protocol, that also powers Mastodon. This would ensure that Threads users would be able to interact with Mastodon users, or other platforms that support the ActivityPub protocol, and take their accounts with them.
Why was it created?
The head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri, said in a recent interview that ‘given everything that was going on (with Twitter), we thought there was an opportunity to build something that was open and something that was good for the community that was already using Instagram.’
How has the release been received so far?
According to latest reports by NBC News, 10 million users have signed up to Threads in seven hours. Also, it has been reported that a number of celebrities have joined the app including Gordon Ramsay, Jennifer Lopez, Coldplay, and Shakira.
Overall, the initial launch seems to have been successful in capturing people’s attention and getting a significant number of signups, but the real work from Threads starts now to ensure that this is a platform users want to stay on. Moving forward, our work as a consumer PR agency is to keep on top of this latest trend and see if it is a platform worth utilising.
Want to find out more about Mastodon? Check out Escapade’s blog titled What is Mastodon? and related Meta posts on The Metaverse and Meta Verified!
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Sources
https://about.instagram.com/blog/announcements/threads-instagram-text-feature
