DES MOINES, Iowa — In an industry that already feels hard to keep up with, people may have another social media app to add to their phones.
Threads is owned by Meta, the same company to own and operate Facebook and Instagram. And this new platform is oddly similar to its competitor, Twitter.
“For a very long time, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/Meta have been looking for that chance to take out Twitter, and this seems to be their moment. Twitter is kind of struggling a little bit and losing some interest from some people. So, they’re going for it, they have launched their Twitter competitor,” said Chris Snider, Professor of social media and digital strategy at Drake University.
They are doing so by tying the app to Instagram, making it easy to sign up by allowing users to transport their Instagram account data over to Threads. And the app is gaining popularity, with more than 30 million users signed up overnight.
Coming at a time when Twitter is in the hot seat after announcing this week that they will be limiting the number of tweets certain users can see.
For those with unverified accounts, they’re limited to 1,000 tweets a day, and if the account is verified, they can see up to ten thousand tweets daily, but that requires a monthly subscription.
“It just seems that Twitter has some new rule every other day and that they just kind of come at Elon’s whim. So, it’s just not clear what’s going on there, it feels a little bit unstable for users and for brands especially that are trying to succeed in the social media space. They are just not sure what’s going to happen there. I think the big misstep for Twitter has been what they did with the blue checkmarks and letting people pay for a blue checkmark. So, suddenly it’s just not clear for what it means to have a verified account on Twitter, and it has caused a lot of confusion,” said Snider.
Overall saying that Twitter does still hold space in the social media world, Snider believes that Threads will have to do more to knock the company out of the race completely.
