Threads May Have Been a Quick Fad, Usage Drops to a Fraction of Twitter (X) Usage
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A month or two ago, many were telling us there would a mass exodus of Twitter for Threads.
Whatever interest in Threads had has waned, quickly and a lot.
The Guardian’s Abené Clayton reports:
The daily usage of Threads, Meta’s answer to Twitter, continues to slump after a strong start in its first weeks of existence.
Engagement with the social media app is down 79% from a high of 2.3 million active users in early July to 576,000 as of 7 August, according to Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform.”
It’s not just you and I who have left Threads.
[L]arge US companies like the fast food chain Wendy’s, the clothing store Anthropologie and Rare Beauty, a makeup line, have all decreased the number of posts they publish on Threads, Adweek reports.”
On its busiest day, the number of users on Threads was less than half of that on Twitter. My guess is half of those on Threads were looking-loos.
I am not tying to bash Threads. I used Threads for the better part of a month, sharing what I had previously sharing shared on Twitter. I saw nice engagenent, until everyone seemed to return to Twitter, if they have ever left Twitter to begin with.
In addition, I did not see major news contributors – mainstream media reporters or bloggers. Threads did not work well for following news, a major value of Twitter.
Finally, a lot of us couldn’t figure out how to follow people, news and engagement on Threads. The set up is not there to do so and no one from Meta ever jumped in to say upgrades were coming.
Could Threads make a comeback against Twitter? Anything is possible, but with Twitter being the third largest social media platform with over 350 million users, trailing only Facebook and Instagram (both Meta owned), I’m not betting on it.
Zuckerberg appears to have lost this cage match with Musk.