User engagement with Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter rival Threads dropped sharply in its second week of operation.
Zuckerberg’s Instagram promoted Threads as a saner social media platform for user engagement and discussion, in contrast to the turbulence of Elon Musk’s Twitter with its controversies and frequent shifts in user policy.
Threads was off to a flying start in its first week, with more than 109 million Android users using it in one day.
“On its best day, July 7, Threads had more than 49 million daily active users on Android, worldwide. That’s about 45% of the usage of Twitter, which had more than 109 million active Android users that day,” SimilarWeb said in a blogpost.
But in its second week of operation, Threads users were likely weighing up whether they really needed a new social media presence with Threads.
“By Friday, July 14, Threads was down to 23.6 million active users, or about 22% of Twitter’s audience,” said SimilarWeb.
Over the same period, engagement with Threads went from 21 minutes to 6 minutes.
Meta itself claims 100 million people have signed up to Threads’ accounts. However, despite its list of problems, Twitter doesn’t seem to have been damaged by Threads.
SimilarWeb said that during the first days of Threads, time spent on Twitter by Android users dropped 4.3 percent, but the average total time on Twitter was still a credible 25 minutes. But there were signs that Threads could eat directly into Twitter’s market share, it said.
FILE PHOTO: Meta’s Threads app and Twitter logos are seen in this illustration taken July 4, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
“To a large extent, Threads solves the ’empty party problem’ that makes it tough to start a new online community by allowing Instagram users to instantly create a Threads account, bringing their existing contacts with them,” says SimilarWeb.
It said Twitter’s audience has been in long term decline, dropping from 19 percent in May 2022 to 16 percent in May 2023 among those who used the Twitter app regularly over 30 days.
Yet it seems Threads will need more than simply not being Twitter to gain a large, enduring audience.
