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Advertisers are eagerly watching how meta A new topic messaging app is in development over the next few months as they look for a new social channel to reach consumers while Twitter continues to struggle.
Instagram threads debuted last week and have amassed more than 100 million subscriptions, which has caught the attention of many businesses, several digital marketing agencies and industry experts told CNBC.
Natasha Blumenkron, Tinuiti’s vice president of paid social marketing, said the topics have become the topic of the day for her company’s clients, who are trying to figure out how the messaging app fits into existing social media strategies.
Many companies that have stopped advertising on Twitter due to brand safety concerns, including a reported increase in racist and hate speech on the platform owned by Tesla chief Elon Musk, are excited about the possibility of advertising on topics once that option becomes available, Blumenkron said.
Meta is currently more focused on building Thread’s core product than monetizing the app, Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said in several interviews and posts on Threads. Many popular features common to other social apps, such as the ability to use hashtags or read posts in chronological order, are not currently available, and Mosseri said his team is working to integrate some of these tools.
Blumenkron explained that many brands are interested in Threads’ potential to add more features such as time feeds and the ability to search for hashtags. These features can be useful for companies to ensure that their posts are shown to the right audience and help them understand popular topics that can benefit their content.
“When we think about playing in the paid space, brands really want to make sure their content reaches relevant audiences,” Blumenkron said. “You’re paying to play at the end of the day, and you want to make sure you’re in the most logical place.”
Rachel Tebograf, CEO of marketing technology firm MikMak, said her company’s consumer product and retail customers are also interested in the advertising opportunities on Topics, as they are constantly trying to “find new eyeballs,” especially as brand safety issues on Twitter continue to increase. .
MikMak was able to infer that many of the company’s clients significantly undercut their Twitter ad spend based on the amount of traffic the company is driving from the paid advertising campaigns it helps run for clients, it said.
For example, MikMak recorded a 42% drop in Twitter traffic between April and May, indicating that companies were pausing their paid advertising campaigns. When Linda Iaccarino, former head of global advertising at NBCUniversal, became CEO of Twitter in June, MikMak recorded a 21% increase in Twitter traffic, suggesting that for some brands, the longtime ad manager’s access to Twitter caused an increase in Twitter traffic. Some companies to spend it, said Typograph.
Typograph added that it’s too early to tell if the debut of leads will affect Twitter Ads sales so far.
Twitter issued an automated response when reached for comment.
Along with Threads’ increasingly growing user base, Tipograph said companies are interested in Threads because it shares similar back-end management tools to Instagram, which means companies’ social media managers can have an easier time using the platform. Additionally, businesses that already have Instagram accounts can move their followers to Topics instead of building an audience from scratch.
“It’s the most immediate rehabilitation experience I’ve had in the history of my career, and my entire career has been in the social field,” said Tipograph.
However, Tipograph believes that for threads to have a significant impact on online advertising, they will need users who regularly interact with each other on the site, which can be measured by the number of daily active users, which is a well-established marketing metric.
For Tal Jacobson, the new CEO of digital advertising firm Perion Network, “the number of sign-ups doesn’t mean much.” He said that while it was easy for existing Instagram users to create Thread accounts, it was unclear how active they were on the service.
“The number of conversations is really the number you need to look for,” Jacobson said, regarding the statistics that will be most useful to advertisers.
Because the topics are so new, Typograph said, it’s unclear what kind of audience the topics attract. She added that companies will be watching to see if the messaging app attracts a different kind of audience than just existing Instagram users, which will influence their marketing plans.
Instagram’s Mosseri recently said that Topics won’t actively promote discussions about news and politics, and the company believes catering to topics like fashion and sports will be less divisive. For this reason, some of Twitter’s core audience, who use the service to keep up with the fast-paced nature of news and politics, may be less interested in using Topics, if the platform is geared toward lifestyle and entertainment.
Even if the topics don’t attract an audience interested in news and politics, they can still be good business for Meta, according to Brian Weiser, a media consultant and former technology analyst. The total target audience for entertainment and lifestyle content may be much larger than the number of people interested in serious news, which can be a “better business” to focus on and less reputational risk, Wieser said.
Wieser believes that themes could be “a cool and growing multi-billion dollar business” for Meta if it can keep users glued to the service, and if it doesn’t turn into an indistinguishable video app.
Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of the nonprofit Media Matters for America, said that if Instagram chooses to focus more on lifestyle content than hard news, it won’t have the same importance as Twitter to influence national and global affairs.
“It may have commercial viability, but it won’t have any real relevance,” Carusone said.
Media Matters and other groups including the Free Press and Accountable Tech urged advertisers to stop spending on Twitter when Musk took over last fall, citing an increase in hate speech and other concerns.
While Topics may not currently have the same amount of offensive content on its service that drives users and advertisers away, Carusone said it’s possible that the same bad actors and trolls who ramped up their activity on Twitter could be doing it on Topics.
Caruson noted that Nick Fuentes, a livestreamer and outspoken anti-Semite who was banned from Instagram in 2019, recently said he created a fake Instagram account, Thread, and urge His fandom is to “blow up the pills and some people out there”.
If Meta isn’t willing to engage with users intent on posting misinformation and divisive content on Topics, the messaging app risks alienating advertisers as well as users, Caruson said, adding that Meta isn’t free from Twitter’s issues, especially after Meta’s layoffs. . On trust and safety teams.
“My point is that the threads are essentially amplifying a problem that Instagram solved (that) Facebook never solved,” Carusone said. “I think this is a real thing.”
He watchesThemes has become the fastest growing app in history with 100 million users
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