Publishers flock to Threads
Meta, the owners of Instagram and Facebook, launched the new app Threads—a very similar platform to Twitter—on 5 July, gaining 100 million users in only five days, as those frustrated with Twitter since Elon Musk’s takeover of the platform adopted the new app as a fresh alternative. Many local publishers were among those to have opened accounts on Threads, which allows users to share conversations using text, links, photos and video.
With the same owner as Instagram, Threads makes it easy for Instagram users to automatically follow accounts on Threads that they already follow on Instagram and this appears to have given publisher users a healthy start on follower numbers. Penguin Book Australia’s account on Threads is perhaps the largest of local publishers, with over 7900 followers in less than one month, where most of the users carried across from its 73,000 followers on Instagram.
‘Since we signed up to Threads, we have seen a lot of our existing Instagram followers engaging,’ Echo marketing coordinator Kaarina Allen told Books+Publishing. ‘We think this is due to the automatic transfer from Instagram when users sign up. However, we have noticed that the number of followers we have on Threads is only about 12% of our total Instagram following. This leads us to believe that there are still many people who have not yet installed Threads.’
Hardie Grant digital marketing manager (books & explore) Emily Erwin is positive about the experience on Threads so far. ‘We’ve really enjoyed the interactions we’ve had on our Threads account over these first few weeks!’ Erwin told Books+Publishing. ‘Our followers have been very generous in their conversations with us about our mutual love of books. One highlight was when we asked Threads users what they felt like cooking and we were able to recommend specific cookbooks from around the office which was great fun.’
Erwin said Hardie Grant had also found ‘followers are much more likely to comment and engage with us than on our other social channels (including Twitter!)’. ‘It feels as though they are more comfortable engaging with brands like we are fellow standard accounts which is a really exciting new step in the way we use social media for advertising and brand loyalty.’
HarperCollins social media and marketing executive Lizzie Baral is cautiously positive, based on HarperCollins’ limited use so far. ‘We haven’t posted much but there’s been some positive comments about our first thread/us being on the platform,’ Baral told Books+Publishing. ‘I’m still getting a feel for the right content for this platform (hence not much posting so far) but I feel like it could be a positive force in social media.’
Fremantle Press head of sales and marketing Claire Miller told Books+Publishing the publisher’s Threads account ‘couldn’t have been easier to set up’, with the Fremantle account gaining almost 500 followers after a week on the platform. However, Miller said Fremantle was taking it slow in posting content as it learned to navigate the new platform. ‘We’ll be watching with interest to see what the industry does with it,’ she said.
Baral agreed that the platform was ‘pretty intuitive to use’, while Erwin said ‘the simple UI makes is easy and enjoyable to post content’; however Erwin and Allen noted some limitations. ‘It presents a unique challenge for engaging with other Threads accounts as a business,’ said Erwin. ‘With no search or hashtag function (yet), the feed must be manually browsed to find content to engage with, which can be time consuming for a busy marketing employee. Threads feels like a consumer-focused space right now, with a focus on casual conversation and fun interactions, so we are prioritising community engagement over traditional promotion at this time.’
Allen said the platform algorithm ‘can be ambiguous at times’. ‘The home page shows users content from both followed and unfollowed users—diluting the content that we want to see. The addition of a direct link from the Instagram profile pages to Threads allows it to be navigated and consumed as an add-on to the existing app as well as a stand-alone social media platform. This addition may influence the content that we put on in an attempt to reduce repetition.’
Although it doesn’t yet provide the option to search for keywords in the text or create hashtags, Threads is very similar to Twitter in many other respects—and does allow users to share lengthier posts: users can share text of up to 500 characters long, while also including links, photos and videos up to 5 minutes in length.
From a bookseller’s perspective the team at Pulp Fiction books, which specialises in science fiction, fantasy, crime and mystery, said the store was ‘waiting impatiently for chronological timeline; and a desktop version’, with a handful of its Twitter followers having responded on Twitter, and a handful following on Threads. ‘Mobile devices are not our preferred way of publishing, and transferring assets, etc. is already boring,’ they said. ‘[We] regard [Threads] as the least worst of a bunch of evils at present,’ said the team, which ‘would prefer a non-Musk-owned Twitter of 2021 back again’.
Allen sums up the feelings of those in the industry Books+Publishing spoke with: ‘We feel that the true potential of threads is yet to be seen. At this stage, the number of users engaging with the platform is still growing with many users, like us, still hesitant to fully engage’.
Category: Features
