Meta’s Threads became the fastest-growing app of all time. It acquired 100 million users in the first five days of its launch. To compare, its competitor Twitter took five years to reach the same number.
Social media is a zero-sum game. All the players compete for the limited attention span of the users. Going to the top always comes at the cost of other competitors’ users’ time. Moreover, they are not only essentially competing with other social media for the users’ time span, but for other media like television, OTTs, etc. Everyone is in the race to grab the users’ time.
Let’s see what are the strengths of both Meta and Twitter.
Meta has a huge existing user base in Instagram of 2.3B users globally. Threads users do not have to start their content journey from scratch, as they have already following people. Starting from zero is always a difficult job to do.
Twitter’s biggest strength is the limited but quality users which they have. They have influential figures actively using the platform. Politicians, entrepreneurs, sportsmen, journalists, notably. It has a good reputation of a relatively better source of truth for all the happenings around than other platforms.
To stay in the game, both Threads and Twitter have to build stronger moats around their existing strengths. This is now a game of successful execution.
Threads is not the first text-based social media platform. Facebook was not the first social networking site. Google was not the first search engine.
Long story short – in the tech industry there were always similar products launched prior to the established players. But a common pattern is that there has been only One strong product remaining in a segment, which has dominated the space unequally. It has been a kind of winner-takes-all situation.
It will be interesting to see how this text-based social media segment shapes up ahead.
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