What Is This New 'Threads' App And Understanding Its Record Setting Growth | Career Nuggets

In a majorly disruptive move in the social media landscape, Meta Platforms, the company behind Facebook and Instagram, introduced Threads - “A new way to share with text”. Launched on July 5, 2023, Threads now holds the record as the quickest social media platform to reach 100 million users, achieving this monumental milestone in a mere five days. 

The numbers aren’t the only reason Threads has been making headlines. A rival to Elon Musk’s Twitter, Threads cashes in on the potential for text-based microblogging via Instagram, allowing users to share up to 500 characters of text (plus images, links, and 5-minute videos) with their Instagram handle.

Though it’s functionally similar to Twitter, Meta wants Threads to be more than just a clone of its competition. The free app aims to stand out in the crowded social media landscape by focusing on real-time conversations and public posts – something it hopes will resonate with an audience seeking immediacy, authenticity, and engagement.

Keep in mind, Threads hasn’t yet reached its full potential. At launch, the app was available in just 100 countries – excluding the EU. Its initial hype saw the app reach its first 2 million sign-ups within 2 hours. Within 4 hours, that number grew to 5 million. Before the day was done, it surpassed 30 million users and the line to 100 million users could start to get drawn.

How long did it take other platforms to reach that 100 million milestone? We crunched the numbers:

• Netflix: 10 years

• Uber: 6 years

• Twitter: 5 years

• Facebook: 4 years

• Snapchat: 4 years

• WhatsApp: 2.3 years 

• Instagram: 2 years

• TikTok: 9 months 

• ChatGPT: 2 months

• Threads: 5 days
  

Our Take:

Yes, Threads is a lot of fun. It’s attracted big names like Kim Kardashian, Mr. Beast, and Bill Gates (not to mention it’s quite lucrative engagement-wise if you’re a brand!) Its marketing is particularly clever, too. But we can’t chalk up all of its early success to these factors.

After all, who hasn’t heard of the beef that’s brewing between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, the billionaires behind Twitter and Meta? Cage match or no, it already had people talking before the big reveal. It also happens to follow major headwinds at Twitter after Musk’s takeover. We’ll watch that buzz build in the coming months with Twitter most recently threatening a lawsuit against its social media rival.

What jumped out for us from the list above is the time it’s taking apps to reach this once-huge milestone. In the past 2 years, we’ve seen 3 apps get to 100 million users using virality to create a buzz that’s larger than life and creates a swell of users at the beginning of a product's lifecycle. Compare the growth rate in more recent apps like TikTok (launched in 2016) and ChatGPT (launched in 2022) against tech dinosaurs like Netflix (streaming since 2007, though it feels like a million years ago) and we can’t help but see a trend.

Is this feasible for every company and something you should measure yourself against? Nope! Threads and ChatGPT both had significant backing from a PR, Product, Engineering, and Marketing standpoint–backing not many companies start out with. But while you might not be able to copy the playbook 1-for-1, there are still ideas you can try if you want to replicate some of the instant success seen by Threads for your product.