Context Collapse: Meta Threads Edition
Facebookplex vs Elon Musk Twitter from the comms POV: CC #220
In this issue: Meta-Facebook-Instagram-Omniplex does a thing.
I’m Neal Ungerleider. I run Ungerleider Works and used to work as a reporter for Fast Company, write op-eds for the LA Times, and work as a senior copywriter for R/GA. My newsletter, Context Collapse, helps readers navigate the weird new world of communications while gleefully ignoring any conventional wisdom about marketing, public relations, advertising, and marketing.
So… something interesting is going on in social media land. After more than six months of Elon Musk running Twitter erratically, Facebook parent company Meta officially launched Threads—a direct Twitter competitor designed for iOS and Android.
(Video via Bloomberg)
I set up a Threads account. Getting started with Threads was quick and required no technical skill whatsoever, and following my Instagram contacts required only a couple of clicks.
(PS: Follow me on Threads!)
Facebook/Meta employs some of the world’s best UI and UX (user interface and user experience) experts and it shows—using Threads is a joy compared to the learning curve associated with Twitter and its nerdier competitors like Bluesky and Mastodon.
Here are the things I’m paying attention to:
1. Using Threads Is A Joy.
You know what people in advertising/marketing or in media know but keep forgetting about? That they’re much, much more tech savvy than the general public.
One of the biggest problems Twitter has historically faced is that it is harder to use compared (initially) to Facebook and (later) to TikTok. While posting has always been easy in Twitter, discovery and hashtags—LOL remember back when those mattered on the platform—have always proven to be larger challenges. There’s just more friction in getting started on Twitter as a new user, and more in-group norms to master as well.
But Meta’s team made Threads with a seamless UI/UX interface that both passes muster with power users angry at Musk’s Twitter changes and with normie Instagram users who tried Twitter a couple of times over the years, but never “got it.”
2. Meta’s Growth Specialty.
There are two things that Meta (the parent company of both Facebook and Instagram) is very good at in particular: Advertising and scaling social media platforms. We’ll get to advertising in a minute… but for now, let’s talk about scaling. Meta has turned Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger and Facebook Marketplace into ridiculous growth machines that—once they catch on with users and advertisers—reliably generate revenue. While Meta’s experiences with hardware have been more mixed, they are undisputed champions of scaling social media platforms into global giants.
3. Threads’ Crazy Advertising Potential.
Meta made approximately $2.86 billion in revenue in the first quarter of 2023. For a company which generates revenue primarily by selling advertising space in users’ social media feeds… That’s a lot of money. Meta is particularly skilled at breaking down users into small, targeted micro demographics based on age, gender, geographic location, income, tech devices use, online interests, occupation, browsing habits, and a million other data points. While Threads does not currently have advertising as of July 2023, I fully expect to see ad units there that resemble what we see in Instagram, Facebook and Twitter. Their rival Twitter, on the other hand, has historically struggled with advertising revenue.
4. Threads = Semi-Walled Garden?
As of July 2023, Threads is available on Android and iOS mobile devices. When you go to their web homepage, it sends you to a QR code for downloading the app. You can view individual users’ Threads homepages, but that is about it. By contrast with Twitter and Facebook (platform agnostic) and Instagram and TikTok (platform agnostic, but very, very geared towards mobile walled gardens), Threads is embarking at launch on a semi-walled garden approach which keeps users largely inside Meta’s app.
However, this may change. The launch press release promises unspecified compatibility with open protocol ActivityPub:
Soon, we are planning to make Threads compatible with ActivityPub, the open social networking protocol established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the body responsible for the open standards that power the modern web. This would make Threads interoperable with other apps that also support the ActivityPub protocol, such as Mastodon and WordPress – allowing new types of connections that are simply not possible on most social apps today. Other platforms including Tumblr have shared plans to support the ActivityPub protocol in the future.
Something to watch, basically!
5. Twitter’s Stumbles, Meta’s Gains.
Twitter Inc. has had a pretty crappy year. Apart from the big picture stuff of advertising revenue decreasing industry-wide due to the economy, Elon Musk has been a pretty damned erratic Chief Twit. Instead of the public-facing persona of the visionary Tesla or SpaceX leader pushing into new scientific frontiers, Twitter users and advertisers instead saw one of the world’s richest men shitposting, trolling, and making some very questionable business decisions around monetization, advertising, and steering users towards freemium services.
There’s an argument to be made that there’s an alternate universe where Elon Musk took over Twitter and immediately looked to reassure advertisers, improve longstanding UI/UX issues, and keep making sure that users continue to generate free content for the platform to monetize.
Unfortunately, we don’t live in that universe and new Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has a long road ahead of her.
All of this is to say that Twitter is hurting and Meta knows that there’s blood in the water. Knowing Meta’s MO, I expect Threads to stay ad-free for a while and for some very clever growth hacks to be used to steer ordinary Facebook and Instagram users towards the service. I also expect Threads to fully develop some TBD demographics of its own, some of which will be very helpful to marketers and others not so much.
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