Of course you’ve heard of Threads, the latest offering from Meta. There’s plenty of celebrity drama in the story. But should you actually care? And should your brand?
Justin Chase, Executive Vice President, EVERSANA INTOUCH Media, has the expert information and advice you need! Here, he answers your top three questions:
Does Threads matter for pharma advertisers?
There have been so many positives related to the Twitter platform over the past 15 years, but even the staunchest apologists agree it’s devolved into something bordering on insidious. It’s gone from a news-breaking, joke-slinging, social-commentary hot spot to a place of hatred, racism and vitriol. This of course calls brand safety into question.
Still, 50% of America gets their news from social media, and 30% only get their news from social media, so Twitter hasn’t been a platform you could afford to divest from. Until now, perhaps.
Threads might be an alternative: one where everything seems more civilized, from both a feature and an experience perspective. It has the same policies that govern Instagram; plus, there is no limit to the number of posts you can consume, and there are currently no explicit rules against data scraping.
Why is Meta doing this now? Why is Threads important for Meta?
Threads will serve as training data for Meta’s AI. Twitter’s firehose, which was historically cheap and readily available, has become expensive and limited. Meta had no doubt been using that and found the limitations negatively impacted their ability to train their own AI. Enter Threads.
Will Threads be a success? What would that look like?
Meta sees the opportunity to capitalize on the 20-50 million users leaving Twitter and the 3 billion existing users currently on Facebook. As Threads has already surpassed 100 million of its own users, making it the fastest growing platform of all time, the questions surrounding growth have been answered resoundingly. Staying power is another question that hinges on whether or not the platform can introduce an innovative feature users actually care about. Beyond that, Threads would be wise to take a page from TikTok’s engineers, skewing discoverability towards content stickiness as opposed to social graph ~ which would be an innovation for them.
Obviously, paid advertising is imminent as well, but Meta doesn’t want to rush this, only to dissuade users from sticking around. Meta has essentially said that as soon as there is enough content to support ads in the experience without it appearing as if users are bombarded, that’s when they’ll green-light the product.
Remember, even in its prime, Twitter had problems monetizing content, but with one of the best ad platforms on the planet, Meta doesn’t have that issue.
For more detailed advice and expertise from Justin on Threads, check out the following (from which the above answers were quoted, particularly the third article):
- “Meta’s new Threads: Is this a social media flash in the pan or real deal for pharma marketers?” by senior editor Beth Snyder Bulik for Endpoints News,
- “Threads, the Twitter competitor’s impact on pharma marketing: Q&A with Justin Chase”, Francis Pollaro’s article for Pharm Exec, or
- “Send in the clone! Threads is here and likely to stick around,” Justin’s own article on LinkedIn.