Here’s why brands should have some fun on Meta’s Threads

Yesterday Meta launched its Twitter clone, the aptly titled ‘Threads’.

Its day one uptake was huge, with over 30 million users signing up within 24 hours of launch. This included socially nimble Australian brands which were quick to jump on the hype train to see if this new platform would bear long-term fruit.

I spent a large chunk of Thursday playing around with the new social media platform. So did half the people I follow online. In fact, according to Mark Zuckerberg’s own Threads account, 10 million people had signed up within the first seven hours.

Just last year the world was marvelling at ChatGPT scoring over one million users in its first five days. At the time I even compared this to Instagram and how it took three months for it to achieve this same goal. Facebook took 10 months when it launched in 2004.

How the tables have turned.

But to be fair, Meta made the sign up process incredibly easy. After downloading the app you could link it to your Instagram account within seconds. From there it let you import your user names and people you wanted to follow en masse.

It’s a clever strategy and one designed to boost uptake through sheer convenience. It’s also so reminiscent of Twitter that there isn’t much of a learning curve.

What resulted was a beautiful day of chaos as people said hello, shit posted, shared memes and news, and tried to figure out what their Threads personality would be.

This included a plethora of brands jumping on the bandwagon early.

Brands shouldn’t take themselves too seriously on Threads just yet

“Threads presents a fabulous new place to initiate and participate in conversations around business. A place to learn, grow, collaborate and share ideas. All without the pressure to be creative, video savvy, a dancer or a great photographer — we’re coming back to big ideas and witty one-liners,” Odette Barry, PR specialist and director of Odette & Co, said to SmartCompany.

Barry advises her clients that when a new platform launches, it’s a good idea to sign up to secure their handles and take advantage of the exponential growth offered by moving quickly.

“There are huge commercial opportunities — just like the other social media juggernauts: Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The upside compared to its pretty sister, Instagram, is we can link out to products and services,” Barry said.

“You only have to look to the likes of Anaita Sarkar and how she has built an enormous audience on TikTok which supports Hero Packaging, thanks to her sharing business, e-commerce and marketing tips with the business community.”

Barry also taps into the prevalent theme of day one on Threads: fun and chaos. The brands getting engagement and follows were the ones being weird and interactive.

“Right now, Threads is a really informal, playful, messy and chaotic vibe. This is a fantastic time to play and be experimental brands while the platform and users get to know how to make it work for our businesses. But be warned: At this stage, if anyone is taking themselves too seriously on the platform, I think they’ll get laughed off,” Barry said

Gelato Messina has been a perfect example of this, spending the last two days being as unhinged as possible on the app.

“My boss doesn’t even know this app exists yet and I’ve posted like 20 times,” the Messina account posted.

“I wonder what the fancy serious brands that follow us across from Instagram think when they see this direct view of my descent into madness.”

And it’s working. The account is getting tons of engagement by letting whoever runs their socials have fun.

“I don’t think we (I) have really thought much further than just rolling with the app. It’s hard to predict where it will land in the scheme of our daily posting… just going to jump on for the ride and see where it takes us,” the person behind the posting said in an Instagram message to SmartCompany.

“If it results in sales and cultivating a stronger relationship with or demographic/customers then that’s a good bonus.”

Free stuff works too.

2022 Smart50 winner, July, also got onto Threads early. Co-founder Athan Didaskalou decided to jump on, play around and run a competition.

“You have your own community that already knows and loves you and you’re bringing them along from day one. That is the most powerful thing,” Didaskalou said on a call with SmartCompany.

“Anyone can say that ‘We’ve got 10 million active accounts, you should join this platform because you can start that community’. You’re actually starting day one on Threads with the community that already loves you from another platform. That’s what’s helped us with engagement from day one.”

Didaskalou also agrees that having some fun with the platform is a smart strategy for brands.

“I think people are just over a highly polished, highly controlled conversation from brands. When a fan is jumping on and starts having fun with the platform from the early days you know that you’ve got something authentic. They just want authenticity. So I think it’s okay as long as nobody gets offended and everyone’s having fun.”

Meta may have gotten the timing right with Threads

This isn’t the first time that Meta has implemented a copycat strategy. We’ve seen the tech giant pillage most of its competitors for their best features, with mixed results.

While its attempts to mimic the likes of Substack, Clubhouse, and even Amazon failed — Instagram Stories (Snapchat) and Reels (TikTok) have managed to hang around.

But the difference with Threads may all lie in the timing.

Twitter has been on a downward trajectory since Musk took over. This culminated over the weekend when he announced that Twitter would be limiting the number of posts people could see.

For those of us not paying for verification, it was limited to just 300. That number has since gone up, but it left a sour taste in the mouths of users, as well as advertisers.

Within days, Zuckerberg launched an alternative that harkens back to the glory days of Twitter, capturing legacy fans as well as some new ones who happened to already be on Instagram and decided to give the new platform a go.

And the experience has been incredibly slick, easy to use, and honestly — fun. People and brands alike are being loose and it has been a breath of fresh air within the often toxic social media landscape.

Of course, it hasn’t been without its problems. I personally experienced intermittent lag, or content not showing at all. There’s also the fact that it, being a subsidiary of Meta, gets access to a hell of a lot of personal information.

Another issue that users have discovered may be a retention play. While 30 million users in 24 hours is a great number, you have to expect a drop off from a percentage of that once the curiosity wears off.

So Meta has wrangled it so users can’t delete their Threads account without also nuking their Instagram. This is certainly more reminiscent Meta/Facebook behaviour we’ve all come to know and despise over the past two decades.

But the harshing of good vibes doesn’t end there. Elon Musk of course re-entered the chat. He and Zuckerberg spent the last few weeks taking public digs at each other over the launch of Threads. They even challenged each other to a literal cage match in Las Vegas.

This rivalry reared its head again as Twitter threatened to sue Meta overnight, saying that Threads was in violation of Twitter’s intellectual property rights. It will be fascinating to see how this will shake out — both in court and the ring.

But it really is just another fiber in a thread with a questionable future.

Perhaps people will fall off the platform en masse once the hype dies down. Maybe it will be easier to simply wander back to Twitter if some of the mess gets cleaned up.

Who knows.

But at this point in time, as much as it pains me to say, Threads is a better version of Twitter than what Musk is providing. And that’s worth paying attention to.