As Twitter faces growing complaints from users and advertisers about problems on the social media platform, Meta has decided to jump into the space with a new competitor called Threads.
Meta hasn't officially announced the product but the app is available for pre-order at the Apple Store, where it is being billed by Meta as a place “where communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow. Whatever it is you’re interested in, you can follow and connect directly with your favorite creators and others who love the same things — or build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world.”
The launch would complement Meta’s Facebook and Instagram social media platforms and provide Meta with the ability to promote Threads to the billions of accounts currently using Facebook and Instagram.
Since then other social media platforms competing with Twitter have reported upticks in usage but none have come close to challenging Twitter’s reach of about 450 million users.
“Twitter’s self-imploding antics of the Elon Musk era and the failure of upstarts to capitalize on the situation should mean there is an opportunity for someone to capture significant consumer engagement and advertiser budgets from Twitter,” noted the influential media researcher and financial analyst Brian Wieser, CFA and founder of Madison and Wall. “But can Meta do it? I think it’s very plausible.”
“While trust in Meta as a protector of data may be poor and while there are many, many reasons to have antipathy towards the parent company for consumers and advertisers alike, if anyone could take an existing base of producers of content to catalyze usage of such a product, Meta is very well-positioned,” Wieser wrote in a July 5 post, adding that Threads’ chances of success increase if it can offer advertisers a safe platform for their marketing. “[C]onsumers are more likely to use a platform they trust and advertisers are more likely to worry less about whether their sponsorships will be associated with problematic content.”
Wieser stressed that while Meta’s Threads could capture budgets from Twitter, it is also possible that Twitter’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino could manage to "rebuild Twitter without as much involvement from Musk. If that were to occur, this won’t necessarily be a zero-sum game: it’s very possible that a successful Threads could then lead to a vibrant and competitive sector for micro-blogging as a result.”
Others see Threads as a potential Twitter-killer. In an email to TV Tech, Luke Lintz, CEO of the digital marketing and social media company HighKey Enterprises argued that “"In the hyper competitive market of social media, Meta's launch of Threads could be the beginning of the end for Twitter. Not only will the new microblogging platform look and feel nearly identical to Twitter, it will be seamlessly connected to Instagram, which has more than 2.3 billion users and is growing.”
“This could spell bad news for Twitter, which only has 450 million users and has lost more than 32 million users since Elon Musk bought it in 2022,” Lintz argued. “In addition to this, the number of active users on Twitter is dropping. A new Pew Research report recently found that the most active Twitter users are posting 25% less per month following the acquisition.”
“If that’s not enough, Threads will also have the upper hand when it comes to content moderation standards, making it more appealing to advertisers who have pulled millions of dollars from Twitter after Musk gutted the firm’s content moderation team,” wrote Lintz. “In March, Musk said revenue at Twitter had fallen by 50% over the past two years and it's not clear how it intends to bring those advertisers back.”
