Twitter alternative Threads has become the quickest app to reach 100 million members after it was launched on Wednesday 5 July, a day earlier than scheduled. Incredibly, it hit 30 million users after 24 hours and 70 million within 48 hours.

Meta

Our vision with Threads is to take what Instagram does best and expand that to text, creating a positive and creative space to express your ideas. Just like on Instagram, with Threads you can follow and connect with friends and creators who share your interests – including the people you follow on Instagram and beyond.

Threads is created by Meta, and so understandably there’s a fair amount of crossover between Instagram and Threads. For example, users can access the platform by using their Instagram account to log in, although there will be the option to customise your profile specifically for Threads. You can also sync your Instagram bio with your Threads account and carry your followers and accounts followed over from Instagram.

Once you’re inside, users will find ‘text updates’ that are basically tweets in everything but name – although the interface will feature Instagram-like design and font.

The feed will include threads posted by accounts you follow, and because this is a Meta product, content from accounts you haven’t discovered yet. Posts are limited to 500 characters and can include videos of up to five minutes long, photos and links. 

Users can also share a Threads post to an Instagram story. Users who are 16 (or 18 in some countries) will be given a private profile by default.

A positive Twitter alternative

Meta wants Threads to be a place that “enables positive, productive conversations”, and if you’ve ever spent a day on Twitter, you’ll know that it doesn’t always help foster that sort of connection.

Rather, it’s become the home of increasingly angry discourse, especially as new owner Elon Musk has got rid of some of the controls the app previously had regarding what could and couldn’t be posted.

Despite the Twitter-esque look and feel, Instagram’s head Adam Mosseri claims it isn’t trying to replace Twitter – but wants to create “a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter”. He also says that Threads is designed to be a less angry place and Threads won’t encourage politics and hard news on the platform.

In that respect, Threads and Twitter could co-exist peacefully with one providing a space to go for news and politics and Threads a place to go to see your mates’ thoughts on the latest sports results. However, what are the odds of that?

How can businesses use Threads?

Threads is brand new, so marketers should probably spend some time getting the lay of the land before jumping in. However, much like Twitter, Threads is a space for personal brand-building and a place where marketers can show the human side of the business.

For now, sales or promotional posts would feel a little out of place, so keep threads short, punchy, and relaxed. While Threads does support video, it doesn’t feel like its natural home – save it for Shorts, Reels or TikTok.

A recent study by Website Planet shows that Threads is delivering better engagement than Twitter – around 8x more likes and a much better average engagement rate (0.45% vs 0.02%).  So if you can get the tone right, there definitely some quick inroads that could be made over your competition.

Additionally, Axios has reported that Threads will soon feature branded content tools, which would give marketers the opportunity to use paid promotion on the platform.

Rapid growth

One reason why Threads has grown so quickly could be that people are simply tired of Twitter – and this can be seen in the number of alternative platforms, such as BlueSky and Mastodon, that have popped up in the last year or so.

More specifically to Threads, it’s easy for Instagram users to jump across and bring the communities that they’ve built over the years with them. There’s plenty of cross-pollination with Insta which makes building a following easier than it is on a new, standalone platform.

We already know that the growth of Threads has dwarfed anything else that’s gone before. Even ChatGPT, which registered 100 million users in two months.

However, it still has some way to go to reach Twitter’s 250 million daily active users.