SRH | Y’all on Threads?
Media

Y’all on Threads?

06.29.2023

Last week, we were blessed with a brand spanking new text-based social media platform, Threads, and boy, was that a dramatic launch.

Threads is Meta’s take on Twitter. This move should surprise no one; after all, Mark Zuckerberg has 1. Tried to buy Twitter before, and 2. Loves to copy other social media sites (IG Stories from Snap and Reels from TikTok).

What should surprise you, however, is how well this app has been received. After less than a week, Threads already has over 100 Million users; to compare, Twitter has 237 Million active users, and that number is beginning to dwindle.

What Threads did right was make the experience of switching to their “text based app” as smooth as possible. You do it right from your Instagram account, where your username, bio, links, and followers are all imported directly over. It’s an instant dopamine rush to start a brand new account and have all your followers already accounted for - it takes a lot of the work of curating a social presence away.

The first few days on Threads have been pretty amazing. Lots of brands, celebrities, and content creators are already posting and having fun with their followers. Even Ellen DeGeneres tried to make a comeback on the app (bad move on her part) and the ensuing trolling has been kind of a blast to watch.

The question as a Media Director I’m constantly asked is, “Do you think Twitter is done?” And my honest answer is yes. The writing is most definitely on “the wall” (that’s a Facebook joke if you’re too young to get it).

Twitter has lost over 60% of it’s revenue from advertisers. Twitter is also facing some data-scraping trouble, mainly due to a bug within the app itself which sends data into an infinite loop, making it difficult for the app to pull up new tweets into users' feeds. To solve this issue, Twitter is now limiting non-verified users to 600 tweets per day, and verified users 6,000 tweets per day. That’s going to get old pretty quick.

Twitter also was refusing to pay their Google Cloud bill for a while, and while many people speculate that’s the issue Twitter is dealing with that’s causing the tweet throttle, that has yet to be fully proven.

At the end of the day, as an agency, we are responsible for stewarding our clients' media budgets in the proper direction. And with an election year coming up and with brand safety at the top of my mind, we don’t recommend spending on Twitter right now. Not only is the ship sinking, but I doubt anyone wants their ad next to tweets from Elon Musk calling for a d*** measuring contest. Just saying.

(now go follow srh.agency on Threads)

xoxo Milly