This photo taken in New York on Wednesday, July 5, 2023, shows the logo of Meta’s new app Threads and the Twitter logo on the left. , Photo Credit: AP
Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is set to shock Elon Musk on Wednesday night as the tech billionaires’ rivalry goes live with the launch. Instagram’s much-anticipated Threads platformA clone of Twitter.
Analysts said investors are salivating over the possibility that Threads’ tie-up with Instagram could give it a built-in user base and advertising tool that could extract advertising dollars from Twitter as its new CEO looks to revive the microblogging company’s struggling business. Trying to.
While Threads is launching as a standalone app, screenshots posted to Apple’s App Store revealed that users will be able to log in using their Instagram credentials and follow the same accounts, making it one of Instagram’s most popular apps. Will become an easy addition to existing habits for over 2 billion monthly active people. the user.
“Investors can’t help but get a little excited at the prospect that Meta actually has a ‘Twitter-killer’ to launch on the App Store,” said Danny Hewson, head of financial analysis at investment platform firm AJ Bell.
Meta stocks closed up 3% on Wednesday ahead of the launch, as a broader market decline outpaced gains in competing tech companies.
The arrival of Threads comes after Mr Zuckerberg and Mr Musk have been sparring for months and even threatened to fight each other in a real-life mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas.
Matt Navara, a social media consultant who has worked with Meta, Google and Pinterest, said it was an opportune time for Meta to strike, as months of chaotic decisions by Mr Musk have rattled Twitter.
Mr Musk bought Twitter last October for $44 billionBut its value has since plummeted as it has faced drastic staff cuts and an exodus of advertisers amid content moderation disputes.
While Meta might focus on growing users before including ads on threads, Mr Navara said, “there will be big brands that will happily spend a good amount of advertising on the platform” to capitalize on the initial buzz.
“It will be more palatable and brand safe than what Twitter is offering,” he added.
To build threads, Meta is making offers to attract social media influencers to the new app and encouraging them to post at least twice a day, said Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing company Influential. .
The app also benefits from other future Twitter competitors’ failure to take advantage of the service’s constraints. While a number of new and emerging competitors such as Mastodon, Post and T2 have attempted to woo Twitter users, all have remained relatively small so far.
BlueSky, a new service backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, launched its invite-only beta in February and immediately generated buzz on Twitter, with users struggling to get access codes. Its website says it has 50,000 users. Mr. Dorsey has also supported another platform called Nostra.
But history is working against Meta. It has faced several failures in the past to launch standalone copycat apps, most notably its Lasso app aimed at competing with short video rival TikTok.
The company later incorporated a short video tool directly into Instagram and recently shut down its unit that designs experimental apps as part of a cost-cutting drive.
Another potential attack against Threads is that the news-oriented culture on Twitter is different from the culture on Instagram, which is a more visual platform, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“The main use cases for Twitter still remain news and world events,” Ms. Enberg said. “I find it hard to imagine that the most ardent loyal Twitter users who go to Twitter for that type of culture would go away and immediately switch to threads.”
Still, he said, Meta needs to persuade only a quarter of Instagram’s users to join threads to compete with Twitter’s size. “The reality is that Meta doesn’t need to convert Twitter power users into Threads users.”