In its first five days of life, Meta’s new social network, Threads, garnered 100 million subscriptions, making it the fastest growing app ever, and now, a month later, app engagement has dropped and the platform strives to retain users.
Threads’ number of daily active users has fallen 82% since its launch, according to Sensor Tower, with just 8 million people accessing the app each day. A very low figure when compared to the average of 237 million daily Twitter users.
The time users spend in the app has also dropped. A month ago users opened Threads an average of 14 times and spent an average of 19 minutes browsing it, and now they open the app an average of 2.6 times a day and spend less than three minutes a day in it, according to Sensor Tower.
THE PARTICIPATION OF THE FAMOUS DEFLATES
Singers, actors, politicians and “influencers” are part of the 120 million downloads that Threads have achieved in its first month. Some celebrities -like Kim Kardashian- made a profile, but did not publish anything. While other personalities like Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Britney Spears, Shakira, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Oprah Winfrey gained a lot and then stopped posting so often.
DeGeneres was among the first 3,000 people to download Threads. The presenter joined Twitter in 2008 and in 2014 she achieved one of the most viral tweets on the platform by posting, in the middle of the Oscars, a selfie with Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o, Meryl Streep, Julia Roberts, Kevin Spacey, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, but she hasn’t tweeted since April 22.
“Welcome to Gay Twitter!” DeGeneres wrote on Threads on July 5, then posted six times in her first week on Threads, but hasn’t posted anything on the social network in two weeks. Something similar happened with the singer Shakira, who was very active during the first weeks and now publishes very occasionally.
The success of the novelty
According to José Mendoza, a professor at the University of New York, this trend is normal, since the first weeks the novelty of what this new social network of Mark Zuckerberg would be like, which was announced as a less toxic network, without advertising and with less robots
“We will have to wait to see if the platform will be what they are promoting, a platform where there will be a healthier conversation,” Mendoza noted. For his part, Zuckerberg, the company’s executive director, said in the framework of the business results of Meta (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger parent company) that Threads had exceeded expectations.
“Now, we focus on (user) retention and improving the basics. And then we will focus on growing the community at the scale that we believe is possible,” said Zuckerberg, who also said he did not expect to win money with Threads for at least a few years.
These are the Threads changes this month
At the moment, Threads looks like a copy of Twitter -a network renamed by its owner, Elon Musk, as “X”-, since users can post photos, videos and texts of up to 500 characters and interact with them in three ways: powerful to “like”, reposting and commenting.
On July 25, Threads made its first change and began offering the option to view the content of the accounts users follow in chronological order, just like Twitter. Yesterday, Zuckerberg announced that the platform will “soon” have a search function and be accessible via the web.
Although the biggest difference between the two networks is that Threads still does not have direct messages nor can you use hashtags or labels, so there are no trending topics or trends.
Mendoza points out that Threads’ “personality” has not yet been seen, as that will take time. Referring to the future of Twitter and Threads, the expert said: “I believe that all platforms can coexist. Each platform will have its own tools and policies and it will be the users who select the right platform according to their interests.”
