Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg delivered a blow to Elon Musk on Wednesday night, because the tech billionaires’ rivalry went live with the launch of Instagram’s much-anticipated Threads platform, a clone of Twitter.
Analysts said investors were salivating over the chance that Threads’ ties to Instagram might give it a built-in user base and promoting apparatus, which could siphon ad dollars from Twitter as its recent CEO tries to revive the microblogging company’s struggling business.
While Threads is launching as a standalone app, screenshots posted on Apple’s App Store showed that users would have the option to log in using their Instagram credentials and follow the identical accounts, making it a straightforward addition to existing habits for Instagram’s greater than 2 billion monthly lively users.
“Investors can’t help but be just a little excited in regards to the prospect that Meta really has a ‘Twitter-Killer’ poised to launch on the app store,” said Danni Hewson, head of monetary evaluation at investment platform firm AJ Bell.
Meta stocks closed up 3% on Wednesday ahead of the launch, outpacing gains by competitor tech corporations because the broader market edged down.
Threads’ arrival comes after Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have traded barbs for months.Getty Images for SXSW
“Investors can’t help but be just a little excited in regards to the prospect that Meta really has a ‘Twitter-Killer’ poised to launch on the app store,” said Danni Hewson, head of monetary evaluation at investment platform firm AJ Bell.AP
Threads’ arrival comes after Zuckerberg and Musk have traded barbs for months and even threatened to fight one another in a real-life mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas.
The timing is opportune for Meta to deliver a blow, as months of Musk’s chaotic decision-making has roiled Twitter, said Matt Navarra, a social media consultant who has worked with Meta, Google and Pinterest.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, but its value has since plummeted because it faced an exodus of advertisers amid deep staffing cuts and content moderation controversies.
Musk’s Twitter has faced an exodus of advertisers amid deep staffing cuts and content moderation controversies.Getty Images
While Meta is more likely to focus first on growing users before incorporating promoting on Threads, “there can be big brands that may happily (invest) a great amount of ad spend on the platform” to capitalize on early buzz, said Navarra.
“It’s going to be more palatable and brand secure than what’s being offered over on Twitter,” he said.
To accumulate Threads, Meta has been making overtures to social media influencers to draw them to the brand new app and inspiring them to post a minimum of twice a day, said Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing company Influential.
To accumulate Threads, Meta has been making overtures to social media influencers to draw them to the brand new app.Getty Images
The app also advantages from the failure of other would-be Twitter competitors to make the most of the service’s stumbles. While various recent and burgeoning competitors similar to Mastodon, Post and T2 have tried to lure Twitter users away, all remain relatively small up to now.
Bluesky, a recent service backed by Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, launched its invite-only beta in February and immediately created buzz on Twitter, with users clamoring to get access codes. Its website says it has 50,000 users. Dorsey has also backed one other platform called Nostr.
But history is working against Meta. It has suffered multiple failures launching standalone copycat apps previously, most notably its Lasso app geared toward competing with short video rival TikTok.
The corporate later incorporated a brief video tool directly into Instagram and more recently wound down its unit tasked with designing experimental apps as a part of a cost-cutting drive.
One other potential strike against Threads is that the news-oriented culture on Twitter is different from that on Instagram, a more visual platform, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“The major use cases for Twitter still remain maintaining with news and world events,” said Enberg. “I find it hard to assume that essentially the most avid loyal Twitter users who go to Twitter for that variety of culture will defect and go immediately to Threads.”
Still, she said, Meta only must persuade 1 / 4 of Instagram’s users to affix Threads with the intention to rival Twitter’s size. “The truth is that Meta doesn’t must convert Twitter power users into Threads users.”
