Will Meta rip Twitter to Threads?

Mark Zuckerberg has done this before, of course. Raiding rival apps and pillaging functionality, wrenching users from competing platforms to harness their behaviour with a click of his Facebook-fingers (or his Meta-carpels…) A master at serving his own empire with the tech blood of others, he’s timed it perfectly this time. People want it to happen.

If you don’t know what Threads is, you soon will. It’s Meta’s direct rival to Twitter. A “text-based conversation app”, linked with Instagram where “communities come together to discuss everything from the topics you care about today to what’ll be trending tomorrow”. When you add in being able to “build a loyal following of your own to share your ideas, opinions and creativity with the world” it sounds suspiciously like something blue and birdy.

Seven years ago, Instagram launched Stories. It was an audacious, inspired decision. A move of such obvious theft and arrogance that the industry was shocked, disgusted. Snapchat, the hot young thing, the platform everyone was talking about with its disappearing stories and mysterious young audience was very publicly kneecapped by Facebook. And people didn’t like it.

But Stories triumphed in the end. Snap is still there, doing its thing very nicely, living in a space that doesn’t trouble Instagram. Within a year of launch, the Stories functionality of Instagram had double the audience of Snapchat. Now, it’s three times as many. The audience migrated, the platform evolved. Snap rolls on as the peer-to-peer app of choice for students, but everyone is on Instagram. Your mum is on Instagram.

And now it’s Twitter’s turn to face the Meta-music. Clients have been talking to us about their concerns with Twitter for a while now. They’ve been worried ever since Elon said he wanted to buy it. Users have been complaining too. Complaining about blue ticks and boring feeds, about too many ads and a lack of engagement. Very often, it’s not a fun place to be. So, people have been looking around. Flirting with Mastodon, raising a suggestive eye at BlueSky, but never truly committing en masse to a new platform.

Well, this is probably it. Time to commit. Remember, everyone is already on Instagram. Our clients are already on Instagram. Everyone’s friends are on Instagram. They have a password, they have a username, they have followers. And they’re looking for a new Twitter. A place that feels familiar but won’t charge them if they want to view more than a thousand posts per day. A place they can write a funny little opinion and build an audience without having to pay for verification and beg for validation. People know what they like. They like something that’s the same, but different. And that’s Threads. It’s the same, but different.

It's also worth remembering that younger Millennials and Gen-Z (the people brands are currently most obsessed with) are already less likely to care about Twitter. They use it, but not as much as they use the rest of the big six (the others being Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook). In our office, to take just one example, the younger cohort tend to consume Twitter for specific moments (mainly Love Island). For them, it’s not as much a part of the endless cycle of app checking, but it won’t take much for Threads to make its mark on this group. Remember, again, everyone is already on Instagram, and Meta has the infrastructure to steal success. All they are doing is giving people what they want. A Musk-free sharing platform where people can comment in real(ish) time on the world.

It will take us five minutes to set up our biggest Twitter client, Have I Got News For You, on Threads. Because, guess what? It already has an Instagram account. It already has an audience that can migrate. And we’re already writing the content for Twitter that we can repurpose for Threads. Some people have suggested that Threads won’t be successful because, unlike Stories, you need to download a separate app. But that’s exactly why it will work. You don’t want your hot takes on the Ashes or a new government scandal in the same place you want your Reels (that you stole from TikTok). You want to open a new app and scroll endlessly there for a while. Zuckerberg knows this. You know this.

And yes, ok, Twitter might limp on. Sustained by a demographic who have, as yet, resisted Instagram’s charms. But it won’t be the same. It won’t be the home of instant reaction to national events, to shared TV moments, to great sporting occasions. Like a pigeon with a manky foot, that bird is doomed. And if I’m wrong, come and tell me on Threads.

Simon Cooper is a creative director of the creative social agency, That Lot.