10 August 2023

Starting to unravel: Why Threads has struggled to keep up its early momentum

It all started so well. Two hours after Meta launched Treads, its rival to Twitter (since rebranded as X) in early July, it had two million downloads. Within five days it had 100 million users, making it the fastest-growing app of all time. However, fast forward a month and things look very different for what has become known as Meta’s “Twitter killer”.

According to recent statistics by digital intelligence platform Similarweb, Threads’ daily active users have plummeted from a high of around 49 million two days after launch to just over 9.6 million on 1 August.

Engagement is also down with data showing time spent on the app in all available markets peaking on 6 July at 14 minutes a day, but then dropping to just 2.3 minutes by August. Meanwhile, research by Sensor Tower shows the daily active user count on Threads is down 82% from when the app launched on July 5 to July 31.

Despite the slide Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg said in a Threads post in mid-July that he was “very optimistic” about the future of the app.

“Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly 10s of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we were expecting,” he wrote. “The rest of the year is improving the basics and retention.

“It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that then we’ll focus on growing the community. We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path too.”

And the latest grim figures are unlikely to cause panic at Meta just yet, with Zuckerberg remaining realistic about the path the app is on. According to the BBC, the billionaire called the decline “normal” in a call to employees at the end of July, heard by the Reuters news agency.

“If you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” Zuckerberg said, adding that he anticipated retention to improve as new features were added to the app.

Early growing pains

While it made perfect sense for Meta to launch a rival to X to capitalise on the turmoil that engulfed the platform after being taken over by Elon Musk, experts believe the unveiling of the new app could have gone a lot better.

Entrepreneur has called the product launch of Threads, which has been built by Meta’s Instagram team, “underwhelming” from a marketing standpoint.

“What’s made Twitter exciting for the past 17 years was seeing and hearing the blue bird logo with ‘follow me @twitterhandle’ on every TV, news show, radio or podcast, resulting in billions of impressions and traffic to the site,” marketing expert Kevin Kaminyar pointed out.

“Outside of the generic press release by Meta, there’s not been much marketing or advertising done to promote the launch of the new social media platform.”

A bigger problem has been the feedback from users who have bemoaned the app’s limited functionality. Shortly after Threads was launched, the internet became awash with GIFs showing people “running back to Twitter” after trying the new platform.

Early gripes included the fact that Threads did not have hashtags and keyword search functions (which means users cannot follow real-time events like on Twitter), no direct messaging function nor a desktop version that certain users rely on. Not having the ability to only see a feed that consists of the people one follows was also an issue.

A work in progress

Over the last few weeks, Meta has worked hard to iron out wrinkles and add new functions to Threads. On 11 July, it was announced the app will add an alternative home feed of posts as part of a series of updates.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri told the BBC a feed for Threads showing posts in chronological order is currently being worked on. Other things on his ‘to do’ list were an ability to edit post; translation into different languages; making it easy to switch between different Threads accounts; and a desktop interface.

A week later, Meta announced it was rolling out a follows tab, to make it easier for users to see who is following them, as well as giving users the ability to access a translate button to read text in other languages.

Keeping a close eye on the upgrades have been advertisers who told CNBC they’re hoping for Threads to incorporate more features, such as chronological feeds and the ability to search for hashtags, which could help them create better ad campaigns when Meta opens up that opportunity.

Content creators have also warned that, so far, Threads lacks key enhancements – like a website for users to access via desktop – that could help them build their audiences on the app beyond their existing Instagram following.

“Threads is the really good-looking new kid in class that everyone wants to talk to,” Caspar Lee, whose YouTube channel has more than 6.6 million subscribers, told CNBC. “Then over the next few weeks they got to work out whether there’s anything more to them.”

Meta is clearly taking all the feedback seriously. In a Threads post on 4 August, Zuckerberg announced that search and web features will be “coming in the next few weeks”.

“A good week for Threads,” Zuckerberg enthused. “The community here is on the trajectory I expect to build a vibrant long-term app.”

Staying true to his word to keep building the app, Zuckerberg this week announced a raft of new features, including the ability to share a Threads post to your Instagram DMs; a way to add custom alt text to photos and videos included in posts, and a new “mention button” that lets you “easily mention someone’s account in your Thread”.