Mark Zuckerberg, the brainiac behind Meta (formerly known as Facebook), made a huge splash on the social media scene. His new Twitter rival Threads drew an astonishing 10 million peeps in just 7 short hours! It was Zuck himself who gave word of this success, using his own @Zuck handle to spread the exciting news.
Zuckerberg was stoked with the immense takeoff of Threads, and he made sure to express it in his posts. He even employed an emoji that signified how mindblown he was. Talk about an achievement: The app achieved two million registrations within its first two hours and five million in its opening four hours. Plus, recognizing that it’s connected to Instagram (which has around two billion monthly active users, check out Meta’s October data if you don’t believe me), this rapid development is even more impressive.
Users have the option to sign up for accounts on Threads using the usernames they use to follow people on the well-known image-based social network. The goal, according to Zuckerberg, is to blend Instagram’s best features with a new text-focused experience to encourage debate and idea sharing.
The introduction of Threads coincides with significant platform upgrades made by Twitter, the top text-based social networking tool. Twitter has updated its verification mechanism and reduced the number of tweets that free users can access each day to 800. Just before Elon Musk bought the site, Twitter expected its daily active user base in 2022 to reach about 237.8 million.
Interestingly, both Zuckerberg and Musk have expressed their intention to engage in a metaphorical “cage match.” However, Musk’s biographer, Walter Isaacson, dismissed the notion, clarifying that it symbolizes Musk’s rivalry with Meta and Zuckerberg rather than a literal physical confrontation.
The rapid success of Threads highlights the ever-evolving landscape of social media platforms and the intense competition among tech giants vying for user attention and engagement. With Meta’s emphasis on text-based interactions and Twitter’s recent changes, the battle for the future of social media continues to unfold.