Confused About Threads?
You may well have heard about Threads recently, we’re sure it wasn’t named after the 1984 TV movie about a nuclear bomb dropping on Sheffield, but it has caused about as much devastation across social media and escalated the cold war between Zuck and Musk.
Threads was launched on July 6th by Meta as a rival to Twitter and over 100 million users signed up in its first five days. Helped in no small part by the fact it’s linked to Instagram accounts.
Threads went live in 100 countries, but isn’t yet available in mainland Europe as it’s not known if it complies with EU data privacy legislation.
Despite a few problems like this, and ongoing issues with its lack of features Threads had 10 million users in its first 7 hours, with MR BEAST entering the record books as the first user to get to 1 million followers.
Better than the Bird?
A lot of Twitter users have been looking for an alternative since Mr Musk took over, cutting thousands of jobs and adding multiple strange policies to prevent users looking at too many posts and nudging people to pay for a blue tick, because of course a billionaire needs more cash.
Threads lacks a lot of features available on other platforms at the moment. You can’t edit, direct message, see what’s trending or use hashtags. You can however use 500 characters compared to Twitter’s 280 and add both video and photo to the same posts and post videos of 5 mins, a little better than Twitter’s 2 mins 20 secs.
Is it worth it?
Unfortunately for business owners and marketing professionals, the good news is thin on the ground.
In order to sign up for Threads, users must have an Instagram account.
No problem right? That is until you find out that you can’t delete your Threads profile without deleting the associated Instagram profile.
You can deactivate the Threads account without affecting the linked Insta account, but if you delete it then it says goodbye to your carefully built-up Instagram following too.
There is currently no desktop app available.
The ongoing worry about the privacy policy is a big worry, essentially the often unread terms and conditions give Meta the rights to sell everything they know about you. Let’s face it, they know EVERYTHING!!
Also, as it’s not possible to switch accounts and you can’t currently utilise any third-party scheduling software to post to the platform, so for marketing agencies it means they can’t look after their clients’ social media accounts effectively.
Twitter has also threatened the owners with legal action.
A lawyer for the company accused Mr Zuckerberg of “systematic, wilful, and unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets and other intellectual property” to create Threads.
They claim Meta hired former employees who “had and continue to have access to Twitter’s trade secrets and other highly confidential information”. Meta has denied this.
We are keeping our eyes on updates for Threads, and doing our own research into the platform’s viability as a marketing tool. As soon as it’s beneficial to add it to our clients’ social portfolios we’ll be recommending they open their Threads accounts, but until some of the above-mentioned issues have been resolved. It might be best to hold on.
If you have any marketing questions, be sure to contact us!