In the past 17 years, Twitter has had almost no competition. They were the only platform offering limited text messaging alongside links, images, and videos. But with the arrival of Threads, Twitter is all a twitter now and the game is on to see who will come out on top.
Twitter, with its real-time text updates, microblogs, and a variety of sources, has had a great run, but has been fraught with problems over the past few years. And now, with Threads at over 100 million users (at the time of this blog), everything is changing. Twitter has seen a dip in followers, but it’s too early to tell if this trend will hold.
What is Threads?
Threads is Meta’s alternative to Twitter. This app is integrated with Instagram, which is a big reason for its initial success.
Text-based messaging is the leading part of this app.
Having a built-in audience from Instagram will give brands, businesses, marketers, and content creators a head start reaching their followers.
How Does it Work?
- Using your Instagram username makes signing up a piece of cake. After signing up, you can follow the same people you follow on Instagram, if they are on Threads.
- Once you’re in the Threads app, you can see posts, search for people to follow, and view your notifications.
- If you have a subscribed verified Instagram account, your Threads account will be automatically verified.
- Users can have 500 characters of text, videos up to five minutes, and up to ten images per post.
- Users can share their posts as Instagram stories, to their Instagram feed, Twitter, and other social networks—gaining followers in the process.
- Celebrities, businesses, influencers, brands, your friends, news outlets, search engines, TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat can all be found on Threads.
- It’s possible that they might be collecting information/data so do your due diligence to be sure you want to be part of it.
How to Get More Followers
The main way is through your Instagram account. The more followers you have there, the better start you have. When you download and create your Threads account, you automatically send follower requests to your Instagram followers. If they are signed up for Threads, they will see the request.
Post, post, post! The more you post, the better chance you’ll be seen and organically get followers who may not follow your Instagram account. Add in photos, memes, videos, and GIFS to have an even better chance of being seen.
While Threads is new and will inevitably have some growing pains, as marketers and businesses, we need to decide if this is a platform we want to dive into. On the surface and at first glance, we say Yes. But do your research, play around with it, and keep reading information about it.