Lord Zuckerberg of Metasphere launched a new app yesterday (6th July) called ‘Threads’ to rival his great pals’ platform , ahem, ‘Twitter.’

Like two megalomaniac Bond villains , the boys are battling it out for our attention, which to be honest if your attention span is as bad as mine these days is already hanging on a cotton thin thread….”ooh look a bird…..”

But we all have a new shiny toy to play with in the ‘social’ box, let’s go through the round window and see what we have here.

What is Threads?

It is the new messaging platform owned by Meta and it goes hand in hand with Instagram. It describes itself as “Instagram’s text-based conversation app”.

In a nutshell, it allows you to have message/text based conversations alongside Instagram’s more ‘visual’ approach.

You start a conversation, you can add in images and your followers can join in and add to your ‘thread.’ You can share a thread to Instagram, Twitter, your story and to some other third party apps. You can reply or ‘like’ other users’ threads. Your feed on Threads includes threads posted by people you follow, and recommended content from new creators you haven’t discovered yet. Posts can be up to 500 characters long and include links, photos, and videos up to 5 minutes in length. You can easily share a Threads post to your Instagram story, or share your post as a link on any other platform you choose. 

One big difference between Threads and Instagram is that you dont use hashtags on Threads. So we will have to wait and see how you get content out there and found – I assume it’s all going to be in the algorithm based on your likes, your conversations and engagement.

You obviously also need an Instagram account to use Threads. At the moment there is no advertising on Threads (bear in mind this is 1 day after its launch!) but it already has 30m users. I don’t think it will be long before an advertising platform comes alongside.

At the moment, it’s a bit clunky to sign in and out if you run multiple Instagram accounts, whichever account you are signed into  – requires you to log into Threads, you can’t just swap around like you can with multiple Instagram accounts now.

Also , be warned, once you have signed up, the Threads account is connected to your Instagram account ‘forever’. You can de-activate the Threads account, but it is still there, if you delete it, it will delete your Instagram account too.

More information straight from the overlords mouth can be found on Meta’s website.

You can find and follow us on Threads at 

https://www.threads.net/@sharpmonkeys 

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