Threads – Everything Marketers Need to Know

Key Takeaways

hey I'm out of the office today but threads just dropped and we wanted to give you our thoughts on what it's looking like for marketers so far so here is our marketing wizard just to tell you all about it meta owners of Facebook and Instagram just released their new micro blogging platform AKA pretty much a copy of Twitter it's called threads and Mark Zuckerberg is calling it a public conversations app so we can tell that they definitely want it to be this kind of Chatty space like Twitter is where people can have conversations communicate with each other and where Brands can have kind of a personal connection with their customers so let's jump straight into some of the features as well as some of the areas that marketers are really going to care about and what we think marketers and businesses should be doing right now so let's start with a super quick overview of the app itself you can sign up to it super easily through your Instagram account and if your business is already verified you don't need to go through that process again as soon as you sign up you'll get that verification already you're going to be getting a huge chunk of the people who already follow you over on Instagram creating threads accounts who then follow you straight away on there so that keeps things really really simple threads looks super similar to Twitter but some of the main differences are that you can use 500 characters in your posts as well as post five minute videos you can also do similar things that you can already on Twitter like sharing links and gifs some of the kind of downsides at the moment is discoverability seems a little bit limited so users can't actually search for topics or like trending topics or hashtags they can only search for individual users which isn't great for discoverability but we have noticed in the last few hours of using it that we do get a lot of recommended posts and this isn't necessarily people we're following this could be you know brands that have had a really hit post that's getting interacted with by a lot of people on threads so then it's getting pushed to a bunch of other people there's definitely going to be a lot more features released soon and they're teasing something called the fediverse where you you'll essentially be able to interact with users across a bunch of different platforms which could be really helpful for things like customer service you're not having to check all five platforms to see the questions that are being asked you'll be able to do that hopefully all in one it's very early days we don't really know exactly how this is going to look but it sounds fairly promising so let's look at some use cases as well as some of the pitfalls because we can't forget this is a brand new platform and we really don't know what the future holds for it if we're looking back on platforms like Mastodon or Clubhouse there was a lot of hype at the start because people are like oh my gosh shiny new thing and then the user base really dwindled so we're gonna have to be cautious and see what happens so let's explore some of the positives to using threads for your business some of the advantages that we can see and some of the uses for it and then we'll explore some of the risks and some of the things that you should probably be careful of so threads is definitely feeling very different right now than I think it will feel in a few few weeks time a lot of brands are joining for instance Netflix and Ryanair and they're being very very playful now Ryan is always quite playful on social media but Salesforce a little bit less on Twitter they often just share sort of links back to articles on their website with a little bit of text about what this article is about whereas they're posting some more kind of cute stuff fun stuff taking part in some Trends on threads um so I think we're gonna see a lot of that a lot of Brands just testing out the space and having a bit of fun they're being very very playful and they feel very much on the consumer level right and this might not be something that you want to do but there's definitely a Vibe at the moment on threads where brands are kind of just gently testing it out creating a few posts maybe making some jokes resonate With Their audience ryanair's already made some jokes about how people aren't always guaranteed a window seat on their airplanes and Salesforce has already made some jokes about how people don't always know what Salesforce does so we can see that they're being kind of humorous and not taking themselves too seriously right now if you haven't used a platform like Twitter before but you're kind of enticed by threads for your business some of the things that people generally use Twitter form we can see threads being used for are things like sharing behind the scenes things things that maybe you don't feel are the quite the right quality for your Instagram as well as kind of more instant updates so let's say there's a product delay or something or an issue with shipping you might want to update your audience just briefly in a text post on threads which is what brands often use Twitter for it's also a great opportunity to tease new launches and to do customer service it's a great place to answer questions you can't DM yet or send private messages on threads but we think that'll be something you can do in the future so it's a great place to do that kind of customer service if you're a SAS company it's a great place to share software updates any outages you might be experiencing rather than having to post them on somewhere like Instagram where it doesn't feel like it's as instant another great benefit of threads being brand new is that there's a lot of people using it a lot of people initially joining and brands are getting a bit more engagement than they normally would it's also a lovely chance to maybe try out a different kind of tone of voice and test out some different things which can be hugely beneficial to your brand if you have a bigger marketing team we definitely recommend allocating somebody to test out threads try out some new things do some competitive research research into popular accounts so you can kind of see what's happening on the platform what users are responding well to and also testing things on your own account to see what users respond well to on there it's important that you don't assume that just because your audience is coming over from Instagram they want exactly the same content and the same goes if you're thinking about potentially moving over from Twitter to threads right now for Brands it's super super low risk to test out threads and I think it's worth a try your account's pretty much already set up there's minimal work to do it pulls over your description from Instagram it pulls over your profile picture so it's all set up and ready to go why not not give it a try download it allocate somebody to take a look and see what happens so let's talk about some of the dangers of joining a platform like threads so one of the big risks of course is that the platform just doesn't take off that people are jumping on the hype they're getting these notifications from Instagram going what on Earth is this they're joining and then they're like this isn't for me you know maybe they've never used a platform like Twitter before and for a reason maybe it's just not for them and it just doesn't appeal to them the same goes for people who are like well I already have a Twitter account and I don't really mind the platform so why would I make an account with threads so it's important not to assume that by making a threads account you're going to get a bunch of followers because that's just not true or you might find that you get loads of followers in the beginning loads of Engagement and then that just drops off so it's important not to put loads and loads of resource into this another thing that's very important is that you don't just ditch Twitter if you're having a lot of success over there you might be thinking well thread is really similar we've been wanting to leave Twitter for a while why don't we just move straight over there our audience will follow and we definitely think that that might not be the case yes there will be some audience crossover who already use Instagram but there are people out there who don't want to be part of the meta ecosystem they don't use Instagram they don't use Facebook and they don't want to use threads and you could potentially lose that audience if you just up and leave Twitter the best thing to do is to see what your followers are actually up to are they still interacting with your posts on Twitter or are you finding that they're actually starting to interact with your post more over on threads have a look actually through your follower list and go on their account see if they're becoming inactive see if they're moving away from the platform and onto threads that's a really good way of seeing if this decision would be right for you it's also important to remember that you don't have to choose one or the other you can still have a presence on Twitter while also having a presence on threads because the platforms are so similar it shouldn't be too difficult to just copy the content and over from Twitter onto threads so it shouldn't create too much more work although like we said threads is a great opportunity to test some new stuff and maybe connect with a different audience let's have a quick talk about paid ads over on threads now we haven't seen any paid ads thus far but because we have experience with meta and we know how they run their platforms we expect it to be rolled out within a few months or maybe by the end of the quarter we expect they'll want to get users using the app and collect data about them before they start running ads just all over the place something that's great about this is you don't have to worry about setting up a new ads account or running ads to a whole new audience because if you're already using Instagram or Facebook then you'll be able to use data that you already have in there from Those ads to run ads across threads which is super exciting the way that Facebook connects its ads with Instagram is already pretty seamless and the ads platform is really nice it's definitely nicer than Twitter's and platform so it should be fairly seamless for Brands going forward but we haven't had any confirmation as to what the ad formats will be on threads but we can expect that we're going to see the classic image ads maybe some videos maybe gifs and of course text-based ads so it's the chance to test out some new ad formats if you haven't used Twitter for advertising in the past because of how horrible the interface is it's a great opportunity to try out some different ad formats that could resonate really well with your audience especially if you haven't used Twitter before and haven't had the opportunity to test things like text-based ads on social media so what did the ninjas hero exposure ninja recommend when it comes to threads firstly we think you should just make an account and test it out it's really low risk you haven't got a lot to lose meta is already a really established social media Behemoth so you don't really have to worry about whether the platform is stable whether it's safe all those things are already taken care of if you already use Instagram and Facebook it's the same people it's the same level of security so it's definitely worth a try you've got nothing to lose of course there is the chance that it might burn out but there's also the chance that it could stick around and be really really popular so it's worth making an account anyway just to see what happens it's also important to remember that you don't need to make any hasty decisions you don't need to ditch Twitter and move straight over to threads the transition can be slow and steady and you don't even have to leave Twitter you can use both there's nothing stopping you let us know in the comments what do you think about threads will you be using it for your business are you excited about it or do you have some worries let us know down below and until next time see you soon