What Are the Opportunities for Brands with the Launch of Threads?

We haven’t been short of new social media platforms to explore in the last year or so, with a new variation on a theme seemingly launching every month.

Whilst it proved hard for many to get excited by the likes of Lemon8 despite its backing by TikTok owner ByteDance, because of a lack of distinct offering, we’re very much on the hype cycle’s ascent with Threads by Meta’s Instagram team - despite its incredibly similar proposition and environment to Twitter, which is already attracting lawyer ink.

Twitter seemed to be falling further out of fashion with social media users and brands alike long before Elon Musk’s acquisition, which we’ve all read about the impact of, from overnight changes to functionality and policy to concerning positions on free speech.

In Threads, people are finding excitement and hope in a familiar text-based idea, a UX that feels fresh and seamless integration with Instagram providing ease and scale (over 100 million sign-ups and counting). The official rhetoric about a focus on safety, positivity and community sounds too good to be true, but it’s nicer on the ear than the narrative elsewhere.

If we are on our way towards a peak of inflated expectation, it could be our irritation of a feed defaulted to recommendation media for now (you see ‘Threads’ by people you don’t follow) and the inevitable introduction of ads that land us in a trough of disillusionment. But, that you increasingly get both everywhere else and put up with it and there’ll be more Threads functionality to come, suggests a slope of enlightenment is likely. 

Meta has stressed that what we’re enjoying getting to know this week is an ‘Initial version’. That it intends to become part of the decentralised social web and is talking about the Fediverse - a network of independent servers which a user’s identity can cross between the boundaries of, suggests there’s lots more interesting developments and experiences on the Web 3.0 front to come.

Brands have been as quick to jump onto Threads as users, smartly chasing ‘early adopter’ status and the earned reach that can come with it. Time will tell how quickly social leads will need to rush out Threads strategies and how much they’ll differ from what was in place for Twitter, but in any case, some age-old principles of social brand marketing and creativity remain.

Here are five tips for brands to join the party at the right time and in the right way, make their presence felt without making a fool of themselves and leave with more connections and kudos than they turned up with.

The ‘internet moment’ that is Thread’s launch is already at its ‘Oh no, my Mum’s just joined!’ stage, thanks to the help of mainstream media and TV news broadcasts leading on the platform’s arrival. At the least, brands should set up their official profiles fast. There’s little use in an inactive presence and the opportunity to enjoy the eyeballs and accolades of a witty first one-liner will gradually fade, so give the copy writer a shout and get going.

At the risk of getting all ‘organised fun’, the excitement and newness of a platform doesn’t last forever and it will be important for brands to form a plan as to what they do beyond dipping their toes in. As is the case with any other social platform from past to present, it’s important to root everything around a brand’s proposition, define a clear role for your presence (in the context of a broader digital and social strategy) and form an approach, from the things you’ll say and do to the processes that make it happen. 

Brands with the strongest, most distinctive and consistent tones of voice enjoy the most fame and following in social, particularly when it comes to text-based environments. If we look at some of the biggest success stories by brands on Twitter over the years, it’s been those that have a clear sense of who they are, how they sound and what to say or interact with. Knowing this helps a brand to identify and react to opportunities quickly. All brands hopefully have guidelines and playbooks in place already. Dig them out, dust them off, spruce them up and apply.

A fun engagement with a competitor brand, celebrity or influencer? Conversations between the accounts of two brand characters? A short story or script in Threaded instalments? Or a Thread crowdsourcing fan experiences or new flavour ideas? The brands on Threads that stand out the most and attract the greatest levels of engagement will be those that stretch the new environment’s functionality to its limit in playful, inventive ways.

It’s early days for Thread’s offering which doesn’t currently provide account analytics, but surely will, especially once advertising products land. That doesn’t mean brands should press on for too long without reflecting on what’s worth stopping, starting and continuing. In the absence of analytics, it’s a brand’s social media and community managers, living and breathing owned channel activity day-to-day, that have an informed and intuitive view on what’s working or not and what to do next.