Instagram Threads lures creators, and Meta’s challenge is to keep them

Brian Mueller is someone who describes himself as a “master fortune teller”.

Since Meta’s debut on an Instagram Thread the day after the July 4th holiday, the radio personality and comedian, and her stage name B Mo PrinceHe was cracking jokes and pranking other early users of the Twitter clone. Last week, he made several jokes about his novelty threads of oppression take precedence over some of the necessities of life, eg Sleeps.

Mueller has spent the past few years building a broad presence on social media sites like TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube as a creator of short comedy sketches, poking fun at Gen Z and millennials and how they view each other. He now has nearly 3 million followers across social media and online video platforms.

The only major app that has eluded it: Twitter.

“The vibe was off,” Mueller said, regarding the reception of his jokes and posts about the comedy sketches on Twitter. “It’s not really a platform for that.”

Instagram power users like Moller are a big reason why Threads has raced to the top of the downloads charts to become one of the fastest growing consumer apps of all time, passing 100 million users in its first week. With Twitter scrambling for technical glitches and Elon Musk’s erratic behavior alienating many former loyalists, meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg took advantage of the opportunity to kick a competitor as he fell.

The hard part is maintaining users.

Threads rose out of the gate largely because it was easier for existing Instagram users to create accounts on the new messaging service and connect with verified followers. But the app is already showing signs of its declining momentum, with online analytics firms Sensor Tower and Likeweb reporting declines in engagement.

Mueller explores how threads could become a central service for his online presence and a potential way to reach a larger audience. He hopes that the “topics” theme will stay strong and that people will continue to open the app throughout the day to engage with his jokes and other forms of entertainment.

Earlier this week, Meta launched its first big update on threads, adding features that make it easier for followers to see and a translate button so users can read text in other languages.

Caspar Lee, whose YouTube channel has more than 6.6 million subscribers, said it still lacks key improvements that could help creators build their audiences on the app beyond their existing Instagram followers. There is not even a website that users can access via their desktop.

“Threads are really the pretty new kid in the class that everyone wants to talk to,” said Lee, who also has a venture firm and cofounder of marketing firm Influencer. “Then over the next few weeks, they had to see if there was anything else going for them.”

Currently, thread users are not able to search for topics or hashtags that represent hot topics. The feed is algorithmic, based on who the user is following and what content has been recommended by Instagram. There is a sense of randomness and disorganized chaos. You’re not really part of the conversation.

“That’s an important thing on Twitter, that’s on TikTok and YouTube, where you can jump on a topic and a trend and you can get a lot of people following you and consuming your content,” he told me. “It will be interesting to see if people can move from the initial boost they had in the first few days to sustained growth in the next few months.”

Instagram executives started by Positioning threads as a nice alternative to Twitter, discouraging chatter about news and politics and focusing more on entertainment and lifestyle content. Adam Mosseri is the head of Instagram He said Threads can cater to people interested in topics like fashion, sports, music, and beauty who haven’t found like-minded communities on Twitter.

Conflict is a major attraction on Twitter, which is often used by prominent politicians to promote their views and criticize those of their rivals.

Lee even created a popular YouTube video Five years ago he read “mean tweets” with comedian Jack Whitehall. The video has been viewed over a million times.

Mueller said he finds the threads more welcoming than Twitter and enjoys being able to scroll and post without having to get involved in real-time arguments. One of the few things he does on Twitter is read about sports. Even then, he said, comments can be “so argumentative” that they’re off-putting, adding that the combative nature of the discussions has only increased since Musk acquired the company late last year.

The leads, at least so far, “don’t have the same vitriol,” he said.

Marcel Fleurus, a fashion influencer with more than 580k followers on Instagram and more than 1 million likes YouTube subscribersHe says it was a “smart move” for Meta to try to catch frustrated Twitter users as well as people who have left the app.

However, he is still trying to understand how the subjects can help him. Floros built an influential career by offering fashion tips and advice, never finding a way to “deliver any value on Twitter,” which he says is more for news, live events, and politics.

In Stories, Instagram’s limited-time messaging tool that’s similar to Snapchat, Floruss can share tips with photos. He also creates content for TikTok, short video service Reels, Snapchat and YouTube on Instagram. Florus said he’ll “play around” with leads, but isn’t ready to make it a priority given the time he’s been spending elsewhere.

“The potential benefit is outweighed by the amount of work I feel I need to do,” he said.

Florus is not alone in taking a wait-and-see approach.

Chas Laquilad, CEO of the Influencer Talent Agency Bottle rocket managementsaid many of his creative clients are putting off using Thread until the app shows it can be a place they can further their careers.

“They’re not looking to go zero to 100 miles on this other thing,” Laquilad said. “It’s very important not to question what you’re looking at for something that hasn’t been proven or is the flavor of the month.”

Laquilad said that creators would rather spend their time deepening existing relationships than working on a new social media service that could quickly lose steam.

“This really cool entrance had this wonderful entrance,” said Laquilad. The real test, he said, will be Meta’s ability to find sustained momentum.

As it stands now, the creators have no way to monetize their presence on the themes. There are no ads, so brands aren’t looking for influencer partners, and it’s not clear if Threads could morph into a channel to help direct people to sites where they can sell merchandise or promote their Patreon pages, he said.

A Meta spokesperson said in an email that the company’s priority “is building consumer value first and foremost” in order to “explore how to build business value in a way that doesn’t jeopardize the consumer experience.”

The spokesperson also referred to Musseri’s past audience formulations He describes how Instagram has “focused entirely on keeping the lights on and fixing bugs, but we’re starting to prioritize the obvious missing features, like the following feed, edit button, and post search.”

Creators say YouTube remains the number one outlet for influencers to build permanent careers.

“What other platform outside of YouTube has the potential to keep you or a viewer interested for longer than 30 seconds?” Florus said. “You have the attention of people who are worth a lot of money to advertisers.”

While Twitter struggles with Advertisers, the site is trying to gain relevance among the creators. The company recently started paying some verified users when ads are shown in their chats. That may tempt some people to use Twitter via threads, said Tamika Bazil, who works in artist relations and marketing for Time.