Microblogs Archives - Post Control Marketing

On July 5, 2023, Meta introduced a new social media platform Threads. Threads is an app from Instagram where users post threads of short pieces of text, photos, videos, and links, reply, and follow other users they’re interested in. Like other social networks users have profiles, but what’s unique about Threads is that it’s quick and easy to create a new account by importing your Instagram account and profile.

Meta Introduced Instagram Threads on July 5th, 2023 as a new app for short text conversations.

Because Threads limits posts to 500 characters, photos, links, and videos under 5 minutes, I consider it a microblog. It is designed more for sharing text updates to participate in real-time public conversations comparable to Twitter (X) versus its parent photo-focused sharing app Instagram.

The Threads feed includes threads posted by people you follow and recommended content from creators you haven’t discovered yet – an AI algorithm like TikTok’s For You. After requests from early users, Threads recently introduced a new Following feed tab to see chronological posts from people you follow similar to Twitter’s (X’s) For You and Following tabs.

The First Week of Signups Were Impressive.

Brands, celebrities, and influencers found the Instagram connection especially appealing in being able to bring their Instagram followers with them. It’s less of a barrier than building everything up from scratch like other new social platforms. This could be part of the reason for the platform’s early success of reaching 100 million users in less than a week (Twitter(X) has 368 million). This surpassed ChatGPT for the fastest adoption of any online service.

Early celebrity and influencer adopters included Oprah, Shakira, Kim Kardashian, and Mr. Beast. Early brand adopters were Rare Beauty, William Sonoma, Netflix, and Gymshark. Early publishers to join included Vogue, Vice, and Rolling Stone. While advertising is sure to come, the early days on the platform are like the early days of social media where everyone was vying for followers via organic posts and reach. Brands like Anthropologie used promotions such as giving away gift cards to grow followers and engagement.

Instagram Threads features:

Profiles are connected to Instagram accounts and can be public or private.
Post limits are 500 characters with links, photos, videos under 5 minutes.
Users see threads and replies of people they follow in the feed.
Main For You feed is an AI algorithm based on creator discovery.
A second Following feed has been added with a chronological feed.
Users reply to posts or like, share, quote, or repost, but no direct messages.
Designed to be less negative news and politics oriented with no hashtags.

Is Threads The “Twitter Killer?”

It’s hard not to talk about Threads without mentioning Twitter or what is now called X. Many of the features of Threads are very similar to the platform formally known as Twitter with its focus on short content “threads” not unlike short content “tweets” or what may now be called “X’s.” There’s been a public feud between Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk which may be driving this battle between the two social platforms. In fact, Musk’s X Corp. has threatened to sue Meta over these similarities.

Meta is open about pitching Threads as a “friendlier” Twitter (X) that’s not a place for news and politics. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri said, “The goal is to create a public square for communities on Instagram that never really embraced Twitter and for communities on Twitter (and other platforms) that are interested in a less angry place for conversations, but not all of Twitter.”

Will Threads Be Less Negative?

Some of the features to “tune out the noise” include hidden words to not see posts that contain them and filtering out replies to threads with certain words. You can also unfollow, block, restrict, and report profiles. Many have felt that Twitter has increasingly become a more negative place. In fact, academic studies have found negative tweets increase the probability of retweeting and viral spread.

Musk has also indicated he is taking Twitter into a freer speech direction with less content moderation. Meta is contrasting this with messages that Threads will strive to make a friendly and more positive platform with content moderation. The first indicators did seem to indicate a drop in Twitter traffic (5%) in the first days of the launch of Threads.

Early Signups Don’t Guarantee Long Term Success.

Of course, quick adoption by large numbers of users doesn’t automatically translate into high engagement or long-term use. The social media platform Google+ had high user numbers. Everyone who created a Google account (Gmail, Drive, YouTube, Blogger) was automatically signed up for Google+. But that didn’t translate into everyday use. Google+ shut down in 2019 due to low engagement.

In deciding to make Threads a part of your social media strategy be sure to check current activity levels before investing significant resources. It will take time to get a feel for how Threads will make itself unique from Twitter’s real-time dialogue and driving the news characteristics. If it does grow an audience ads will soon follow. When advertising does become available Threads ads should be integrated easily into Meta Ad Manager.

Threads vs Twitter Stats — Here’s a comparison of Threads vs. Twitter Statistics about a month after the Threads launch.

It will take time to see if early user numbers turn into active daily and weekly users. We’re already seeing indicators that engagement and users might not last. Since the July 7th peak Threads’ daily active users are down nearly 70% to 13 million from 44. The average daily time spent on Threads is just 4 minutes. This is in contrast to Twitter (X) which has roughly 200 million daily active users who spend an average of 30 minutes on the platform daily.

Total users are down as well. Just three weeks after a record high of 100 million users, Mark Zuckerberg reports that over half of Threads users have already stopped using it. Zuckerberg and Instagram CEO Adam Moseri do say they are working on new features to hook users and entice them to come back.

The new Twitter name and logo X.

The new Threads logo from Instagram.

The sudden name change from Twitter to X may motivate more users to join Threads. Initial reactions by many X users have been negative and branding experts indicate it may be a mistake. Insiders report it’s part of Musk’s plan to create an “everything app” that will become a moneyless marketplace, public square, and video content factory all in one. It’s also unsure if the X name will stay as Meta, Microsoft, and other companies own trademarks on X.

What’s The Bottom Line on Threads?

When investing your time and money in a social media strategy try to look past the hype. Even the largest companies have limited budgets and resources. In evaluating any new social platform or current platform it comes back to basic strategic thinking. When deciding to add a social media platform or leave a current one consider these questions:

Who is my target audience? (current users, potential users)
How active are they on Threads/X? (daily active use, time spent)
What objectives am I measured by? (engagement, sales, leads)
Can I achieve those objectives on Threads/X? (more than another platform)
Do I have time/budget for experimentation? (not dependent on results)

What has been your experience with Threads? What do you think the future of the platform will be for social media strategy?

This Was Human Created Content!

This is my yearly update on the latest social media channels and stats. Social media success is dependent upon smart planning. In Social Media Strategy I lay out a five step process that includes a (1) situation analysis (target market, social media audit, setting business objectives), (2) developing key insights and a big idea, (3) selecting social media channels, (4) integrating other business functions, and (5) linking business objectives to social media metrics with KPI’s in each channel.The third step of selecting social channels to fit your brand, target and content can be overwhelming with so many options. Some list thousands of social media sites and apps, Wikipedia has over 200 and Brian Solis’s Conversation Prism 5.0 has over 200 in 28 categories. To simplify I have divided social media channels into eight categories by key characteristics and list the top three or more channels in each.Social Networks: These are the websites and apps that connect people sharing personal or professional interests through profiles, groups, posts and updates. Facebook now has 2.2 billion monthly users (1.45 billion active daily) and is by far the largest social media channel of any of the categories. Some new features on Facebook include Watch Party which lets people join a live stream with friends so everyone can watch and comment together. The Groups tab brings all groups together in one place and a Join Group button embeds on websites and the dating feature matches users up with others who opted in for a dating profile. The new Facebook Ad Manager has been redesigned for efficiency and insights for optimization plus new education products. LinkedIn is the dominate business/professional social network growing to 562 million users in over 200 countries with opportunities for recruitment, professional networking/development, B2B prospecting, and social advertising to professionals. New LinkedIn features include an active status notification and you can add video to the Summary and Experience sections of your profile. Trending topics has been added to the feed showing trends related to a member’s connections and content preferences. Smart replies uses artificial intelligence to suggest replies to the messages received.

Social Messaging: Instant messaging are chat applications created around social networks for communication on mobile phones with less limits and more features than traditional texting. Facebook Messenger has grown to 1.3 billion users but is still behind Facebook owned WhatsApp with 1.5 billion users. Messenger gets new features like video with emphasis on customer service and bots. New features on Messenger include redesigning the app to be simpler, cleaner and faster with AR camera effects. New WhatsApp features include payments to send and receive money, the ability to delete sent messages, groups descriptions, group video calling, location and time stickers, plus Apple CarPlay and YouTube integration. Other popular messenger apps include Kik (300 million) that is popular with younger users age 13 to 23, Viber (900 million) which is popular in Eastern European countries, and Line (217 million) which is popular in Asian Pacific countries.

Blogs and Forums: Blogs are websites that contain posts or articles in reverse chronological order that include hyperlinks and usually allow commenting. Forums are online discussion sites also called message boards where people hold conversations via threads around common interests and topics. WordPress is the top blogging platform growing to 409 million users viewing over 21.5 billion blog pages a month with top media and marketing publishers including CNN, CBS Radio, TED, TechCrunch, the NFL, and UPS. WordPress has introduced new user center improvements. Tumblr (owned by Yahoo) is the short-form blog focused more on photos and video and less text that has growth to 409 million blog accounts and 737 million unique monthly visitors. Like other social media Tumblr has advertising options and has recently introduced a new safe mode feature to help tone down their adult content reputation. Blogger was the first major blogging platform and is owned by Google. Recent stats estimate 95 million monthly visitors to blogger.com down from 167 million in 2017. Blogger is a simpler platform with less customize options and is hosted on Google servers versus self-hosting available on WordPress. Other blogging considerations are Medium which has grown to 163 million monthly visitors while Typepad has dropped to around 14 million monthly visitors, Squarespace claims hundreds of thousands of blogs published on its platform and Wix also supports blogs. To find forums try directories and search options including BoardReader, ProBoards, or Omgili.

Microblogging: Microblogs are a form of traditional blogging where the posts are limited by length of content or file size. The innovator and leader in Microblogging continues to be Twitter which has grown to 330 million monthly active users with 500 million tweets sent everyday with an option for Twitter Ads. Twitter is great for real time news discovery, has become a second screen for live events and has become a mainstay for social media customer service. New Twitter features include doubling the character limit to 280, redesigned desktop site and mobile app to be lighter, faster and easier, Anti-Harassment and Cyberbullying Features, Moments for everyone, a new explore tab that combines moments, trends and search, and safer DMs. Pinterest is the social pin board dedicated to visual discovery, collection and sharing that limits posts to single images or video with captions of 500 characters and one link in the bio. Pinterest has grown to over 200 million monthly active users. The site is dominated by women, but many new signups are men. Pinterest is the place for topics such as DIY, travel, holidays, event planning, recipes and decorating. New Pinterest features center around visual search for consumers and for marketers through Pinterest Ads. Vine was the micro-video platform built on 6 second videos that shut down in January 2017, but you can still access an archive of videos. A non-Twitter owned new video app called V2 (Vine 2) may be coming. Musical.ly has captured the young teen market with instant music videos growing to 60 million monthly active users and over 200 million app downloads. The app creates 15-second videos and lets you add popular songs, add filters and effects with hashtags. Original shows are being added to Musical.ly via Viacom, NBCU and Hearst. It reaches 14% of teen and young adult US consumers. Clammr was a short form audio sharing social media app, but it shut down last summer.

Media Sharing: This category is for social media channels developed mainly for the sharing of image or video media. YouTube is the original video sharing site with over 1 billion users or 1/3 of all people on the Internet with many shifting TV viewing on this channel. YouTube is a great place for content marketing, original shows, social media ads and video bloggers that provide reviews. The channel is good for brand content marketing or influencer marketing with YouTube stars. Also consider YouTube Music and YouTube TV. Recently YouTube added new live streaming tools and features. Instagram (owned by Facebook) is the quality photo sharing social channel first created as an app that has grown to over 800 million active monthly users with 500 million active daily. It is a good place for fan engagement, social ads and user generated brand content. It continues to add Snapchat like features. New Instagram features include redesigning its Explore tab, with Topic Channels to browse by topics, new group video chat, and AR camera effects for photos and video. Snapchat is a photo- and video-sharing messaging service in which media and messages are only available for a short time before disappearing. It has grown its monthly active users to 300 million and its daily active users to 187 million. Snapchat delivers an impressive daily reach of 41% to 18-34 year olds in the US and average time spent per day is over 30 minutes. It offers innovative social ads and has a new design that is easier to use that may attract older users. Also consider Flickr (owned by Yahoo) which has 90 million active monthly users with up to 25 million photos shared a day, Vimeo with 170 million monthly active viewers for niche video audiences and LinkedIn owned Slideshare with 80 million users is great for business and content marketing with 80% of traffic coming from search. Whattpad is a story-sharing app growing in popularity that now has 65 million users. Brands such as Wendy’s are experimenting with the platform creating stories around its summer drinks to reach teen girls.

Live streaming video continues to expand with Periscope as a leader with 10 million users and 1.9 million daily active users. Facebook Live is a big competitor with Facebook pushing Live video. Facebook claims 8 billion video views per day or 100 million hours (includes all video). Music.ly has also jumped into live video with the Live.ly app for live video with streams viewable in Music.ly and has reported 4.6 million monthly active users. Early innovator Meerkat shut down, but its developers released the new group video chat app HouseParty that is very popular with teens but still only 2 million monthly users. For niche audiences Amazon owned Twitch is a live streaming platform for gamers boasting 140 million unique monthly users

Geosocial: Geosocial is a type of social networking where user-submitted (GPS) location data connects users with local people, businesses and events. The innovator and leader in this category is Foursquare, now called Foursquare City Guide, with 50 million monthly active users and 105 million venues around the world. Swarm is a separate app for checking in, but marketers reach consumers on Swarm through Foursquare. Foursquare is great for businesses with physical locations and offers options for social ads with robust location analytics. Marketers can leverage Google geo-location features though Google My Business that adds businesses to Google location search and Google Maps and includes ratings and reviews. Facebook Check-Ins are the geo-location feature in Facebook that provides valuable benefits to marketers. It is good for increasing reach, generating awareness and has ratings and review features. Instagram Location has added locations with integration to Facebook Places. Both are great ways to increase exposure for businesses and events for search by location versus hashtag. Other considerations in this category are Nextdoor, which is a private location-based social network with 160,000 active neighborhoods with social ad options. Alignable is a more B2B focused social channel. It helps build relationship between local businesses and creates a community around referrals. Other social networks also offer geo-location features such as Snapchat Geofilters.

Ratings and Reviews: Reviews are reports that give someone’s opinion about the quality of a product, service or performance. Ratings are a measurement of how good or bad something is expressed on a scale. The top general social channel in this channel is Yelp with 174 million active monthly users and 155 million reviews. Yelp is the early innovator in crowdsourced ratings and reviews. Founded in 2004 it has grown city by city and can be very influential on sales for many businesses. Yelp offers many social ad options. For travel related businesses TripAdvisor has 390 million active monthly users and 435 million reviews. This social channel provides reviews of travel-related content and travel forums. TripAdisor offers many free and paid tools for marketing. Amazon attracts 80 million monthly visitors, has over 152 million active accounts and offers over 183 million products. Amazon has also been reported as being the largest single source of Internet consumer reviews. Angie’s List is the long time subscription based ratings and review site with crowdsourced reviews of local businesses. Starting with review of local contractors the service has moved on to cover much more such as health care and auto care. Angie’s list first removed its pay wall and now is combining with HomeAdvisor to create more than 22 million monthly users. Angie’s List also offers social ad options. Citisearch is an online city guide that was one of the earliest review sites. However, Citisearch has lost most of its traffic to Yelp. Ratings and reviews should also be tracked on Google My Business. If you are in the human resources or the recruitment industry company reviews on Glassdoor are important. The entertainment industry should consider niche review sites like Amazon owned IMBb.

Social Bookmarking: Social bookmarking sites are online services that allow users to save, comment on, and share bookmarks of web documents or links. Social bookmarking sites have also expanded into content discovery and curation tools. Reddit is one of the top social bookmarking social channels and has 330 million users. If handled correctly Reddit could be a great way for a product, service or organization to get discovered – especially in a specific category or topic called Subreddits. Reddit has also started offer social ad solutions with big brands like Coca-Cola, Toyota and Duracell running campaigns. Digg is the social news site that aggregates publisher’s streams via peer evaluation of voting up content for sharing. Digg has made a rebound since its relaunch growing from under 3 million monthly active users in 2012 to nearly 13 million visitors a month. Digg is a good place for content marketing and also social advertising. StumbleUpon is the discovery engine that finds and recommends web content to users who can rate web pages, photos and videos. StumbleUpon has dropped to roughly 11 million visitors a month. This social channel is good for content marketing, influencer marketing and attracts 120,000 brands leveraging social ads. Buzzfeed is more on the content discovery side of this category but has attracted a lot of attention with an audience or over 650 million. The big opportunity for marketing with Buzzfeed is social ads and the social company is now growing to be a cross-platform network including popular channels on Facebook, Snapchat, and YouTube. Buzzfeed focuses on advertising partners who help create “content that is worth sharing.” Related to Buzzfeed is NowThis News, which creates video news to distribute to other social network feeds. This news for social company started by former Huffington Post heads has grown to 2.6 billion monthly video views and is now expanding into long-form programming, original shows and investigative journalism. Content marketing options may be limited but NowThis has formed partnerships with advertisers such as MEC to make branded marketing videos for agency clients. NowThis and Chase created a campaign targeting Millennials last summer. Social Bookmarking innovator Del.icio.us was officially closed to a read only site in 2017.

Social Knowledge: Social knowledge channels are web-based information exchanges where users can search topics or ask questions and get answers from real people. This includes social sites such as wikis and question and answer websites. Wikipedia is the big one with 374 million unique monthly visitors and over 71,000 active contributors to over 5.6 million articles in English. Marketers should monitor their Wikipedia pages, but cannot make changes themselves. The question and answer sites could be good for content creation, thought leadership and influencer marketing. Yahoo! Answers is a community question and answer site launched in 2005. Yahoo! Answers went mobile for the first time in late 2016 and attracts 317 million visitors a month. Yahoo! Answers Now mobile app has improved features such as notifications and questions sent to experts in categories for better answers. Quora is the newer question and answer site that focuses on higher quality content. This social knowledge channel rose in a short time to 200 million unique visitors a month. This channel could especially be good for building thought leadership. Quora has added an “Ask Me Anything” service called Writing Sessions, offers Knowledge Prizes as incentives for experts to answer questions, a new editor to create more visible and organized answers, and also offers social ads. Ask.fm is a fairly new entrant to this category being bought by Ask.com. This global social site enables users to create profiles and send each other questions. Ask.fm has 10 million unique monthly users and does offer social ads. Also consider Answers.com, ChaCha, WikiAnswers (now part of Answers.com).

Podcasts: Podcasts are a series of episodes of digital audio or video content delivered automatically through subscription. Podcasting provides a great opportunity for content marketing with brands creating their own shows or native advertising where brands can sponsor influencers. Podcast consumption has grown in the US to 67 million monthly listeners. iTunes is the innovator in Podcasting with the name coming from the Apple iPod. Some estimate there are over 200,000 million Podcasts on iTunes – a number that has doubled since 2013. But not all Podcasts are on iTunes. Other social channels to consider are SoundCloud, which is the global online audio platform that enables users to upload, record, promote, and share their original works. SoundCloud now has 175 million monthly active listeners with a lot of Podcast content being produced and shared. iHeartRadio, the internet radio platform owned by iHeartMedia (formally Clear Channel Radio) also features Podcasts. iHeartRadio used to call them Shows On Demand, but has embraced the term Podcast and iHeartRadio has over 100 million registered users. Stitcher is an on-demand internet radio service that provides news, radio and podcasts. Stitcher delivers free online streaming to over 16 million monthly listeners and could grow as it is now available for Apple Car Play. The latest consideration in Podcasts would also be Audible, which is the audio book distribution channel owned by Amazon. This big player in audio books has now branched out into Podcasts. Another option is TuneIn, which has 75 million users and 5.7 million podcasts.

One other consideration is that there are social media channels that are more popular in specific countries. If you are a global brand you want to look into usage by country and consider channel such as QZone, WeChat, VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and others. This is by far, not a comprehensive list of social channel options, but it does give an update on the top channels in each category to choose the best for your social strategy.

For the latest changes consider Asking These Questions To Ensure You Have The Right Social Media Strategy and its a good idea to Perform A Social Media Audit at least once a year.