Instagram's Threads App: A Challenge to Musk's Twitter

Meta Platforms Inc. released Threads, a new app that is seen to be a significant competition to Twitter, thus potentially weakening Elon Musk's social media platform.

Threads is a platform where users can communicate with one another by posting text, links, and messages. Individuals are able to transfer their current followers from Instagram - Meta's widely used photo-sharing application that has over 2 billion accounts of popular celebrities and businesses - to the app as well as keep the same username.

Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Meta, announced that his new app had acquired over 10 million users in its first seven hours. This still lags behind the 300+ million using Twitter though. The CEO expressed optimism for his latest venture and claimed that while Twitter has yet to achieve this feat, hopefully Meta will be able to do so with an even greater number than 1 billion users.

Influencers that use Instagram have requested the platform to build a text-based companion app, revealed by Connor Hayes - a VP of product. He stated in an interview that they wanted something different and did not want to be faced with having to start from scratch when it came to creating their following.

Meta, the owner of both Instagram and Facebook, has had a track record of taking ideas from smaller online businesses. For example, their Reels feature was inspired by TikTok's popular video app and their Stories component was similar to Snap Inc.'s Snapchat platform.

In the past, Meta's apps have sought to appeal to news publishers, politicians and other well-known figures in order to draw attention away from Twitter. With the launch of Threads, however, it is now offering a product that looks similar to Twitter for the first time.

On Wednesday, the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, shared a post on Twitter after an 11-year absence. His message seemed to joke about his wealthy competitor and caused that person to comment back with criticism of Instagram's 'unrealistic' presence.

Now is a great time for Meta to make its move. Ever since Elon Musk took over Twitter in October with the purchase of $44 billion, they have had to let go many of their employees, decrease their moderation rules on content, and give users and advertisers a lot of difficulties when it comes to technical things.

The financial situation of Twitter has been suffering lately. In March, Elon Musk reported a 50% drop in ad sales from the company's headquarters located in San Francisco. To help amend this difficulty, he has appointed Linda Yaccarino, formerly employed at NBCUniversal, to be the CEO and work on rebuilding relations with different companies and brands.

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Credits

Anurag Paul