With over 100 million sign-ups in the few days since its release, Meta’s Threads is shaping up to be the social app that finally lays Twitter to rest.
Not that there haven’t been contenders. Bluesky and Mastodon were among a handful hyped as viable replacements. And that’s the thing – with little fanfare in the lead up to its release, Threads appears to have effortlessly demolished its rival, Twitter, which has fallen into critical entropy.
Though widely mistrusted, Meta is nonetheless a known entity. It has made the transition to Threads easy via Instagram, which has 2 billion monthly active users.
For those in the media and communications space, Twitter was the go-to platform for sharing news and information. It was a boon to financial PR and media relations professionals because it brought together an array of constituents from the sector, from journalists and bloggers to marketers and entrepreneurs to advisers, analysts, fund managers and data geeks.
Threads may return needed stability on social not only to the financial media but to business and brands more generally.
Although occasionally chaotic, pre-Musk Twitter was still mostly coherent and usable. Yes, trolling was a growing problem, but it seemed the company was making a genuine effort to contain it and to fix its increasingly toxic image. Or at least give the appearance of trying.
But Twitter has now become too hostile an environment for many, with scientists the latest cohort to flee the platform. Many businesses and brands have either shied away or quit.
Twitter’s demise
Advertising provided 90 per cent of Twitter’s revenues, so for someone who admittedly hates advertising to take control, the company’s financial woes were probably going to be inevitable.
Advertisers started deserting the platform late last year and were not coming back anytime soon. Revenue was down 40% y-o-y in December 2022 with ad revenue decreasing by 40 per cent. The company’s top 1,000 advertisers in September 2022 were no longer spending by January. Its ad revenue was forecast down this year by 37 per cent.
As of June 2023, US ad sales were down 59 per cent.
The appointment of ad sales ninja Linda Yaccarino as new CEO made sense. But questions remain as to how she can revive the company’s revenues without first restoring trust.
And the solutions to Twitter’s trust problems weren’t rocket science. The market had simply wanted basic content moderation.
If there was ever an example of why business is as much about culture as it is financials, Twitter is it. Advertisers don’t want to risk their clients being associated with the wrong crowd.
In the free market of ideas, it is expected that the playing field be dynamic and robust, but it also needs to be logical and relatively reliable. Business likes some semblance of order with their disruption!
Towards a decentralised social model
In the end, Threads has provided a lifeboat for the existing model of social networking. But in many ways, it is a legacy model.
Social as we know it is changing fast, and it may not be over for Musk, who has been developing an ‘everything app’ called simply the X app, an all-in-one offering along the lines of WeChat.
The next iteration of social (yes, we’re crystal gazing now) may be understood in the concept of the microapp, which enables a seamlessly integrated and ubiquitous world of ‘socialised’ data points or nodes. To understand the concept a little better it is worth considering the case of Linux: the operating system never took over desktop computing but was revolutionary in powering the internet of things (IoT) and the interconnectivity of devices.
In the same way, social may disintegrate but reappear in decentralised forms in everyday digital life.
This may pose a problem for those social media companies who rely on capturing users (the product) in a singular, centralised environment.
Some argue that there’s method to the Twitter debacle, that it’s a planned implosion. Tech journalist Casey Newton, for example, has commented that Musk’s end game for Twitter is “to blow it up and start over”.
In other words, Musk is destroying Twitter in order to save it.
Whichever way it plays out, the next generation of social, of microapps and open, portable protocols, is sure to make substantial use of video, which, according to Evelyn Mitchell of Insider Intelligence, “now accounts for over half of all social network ad revenues”.
It will also likely integrate a digital currency transaction layer – something Musk has had on the cards for Twitter, possibly via an in-app Twitter Coin.
So, Threads Coin, anyone?