It’s likely that you’ve heard of the popular social app Threads that launched last month. Heralded as an opponent to Twitter (which has now rebranded to X), Threads was set to be Meta’s take on a text heavy platform. A fresh, laid back approach from the image heavy perfectionism of Instagram, and a new player to rival Facebook. 

The app launched to much fanfare and excited users scrambles to download the new app to secure their username. The day after the launch, Threads recorded a huge 49 million users. Three days later, Meta owner Mark Zuckerberg announced that they had recorded more than 100 million sign ups to the app, which makes it one of the fastest growing apps in history. He noted he was excited about the growth of the app and felt confident. 

So just over a month on, how is Threads faring? Well not too good to be honest. It’s looking like a bit of a case of social burnout, with daily users dropping a massive 82%. Average daily time spent on the app dropped from 19 minutes in the days around launch, to just 2.9 minutes a day as at August the 1st. 

So what went wrong? There could be a number of factors at play here, including that people just can’t handle keeping up with another social media app. There is also the fact that it was so easy to sign up for Threads as if you had an Instagram account already, signing up was clicking just a couple of buttons and agreeing to the user agreements (which ironically includes that if you delete your Threads account, your Instagram account is deleted too - eek!). A huge number of signups happened in the first few days, because it was simple enough to sign up and “try it out”. 

At the time of launch, the app was still in its testing stages and there were noticeably a lot of flaws, including not being able to see Threads from the people you followed. There was also no chronological feed, and no ability to DM people, making the app very unusable in some areas and perhaps this led to being unable to retain users interest. 

When our social media manager downloaded the app on launch day, she found herself being inundated with Threads about farming and sport - two things that aren’t really in her interests! There was clearly an issue with an algorithm in the first week or so, and this also likely caused an issue with retention. 

So what are we recommending for our clients at this time? Don’t worry about Threads just yet. Either one of two things will happen; the app will simply go to the social media graveyard like a number of others before it (Vero anyone?), or it will have a complete reinvention and come back. At this stage it’s anyone’s guess, however we aren’t currently recommending it as part of the strategy for our professional services clients.