Meta’s competitor to Twitter titled Threads has officially exploded in growth to nearly 100 million active users.
The text-based platform reached nearly 70-million sign-ups just Friday morning, according to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
As of Thursday afternoon, The Verge reported that users had posted nearly 95 million posts and 190 million likes based on internal company data it had viewed.
The booming growth helped that many users were previously tied to Instagram. Users can sign up with their existing handles on Instagram and retain some of their following as they download.
“Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly for it to be as big as Twitter,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a statement.
Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have already shown some concern about Threads, as his longtime lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter to Meta accusing the company of “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets.
“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, wrote on Threads in response to the letter. “That’s just not a thing.”
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“News hounds and avid Twitter loyalists aren’t likely to defect to Twitter, and Meta will need to keep Threads interesting to maintain the momentum once the novelty wears off,” Enberg wrote. “It’s also not a given that people will use Threads to keep up with news and world events like they do on Twitter, and the culture will be different. But that could work in Meta’s benefit: Even the most engaged Twitter users are fed up with the constant chaos and ad hoc changes, and Threads could offer a nice reprieve.”
Axios reported that as of Thursday evening, more than a quarter of Congress’ 535 members across both chambers had created accounts, as well as half a dozen Republican presidential candidates and White House aides.
Advertisers are keen to potentially work with Meta as display ads have yet to be tapped into the platform. Many view the app as brand safe as it uses Meta’s policies from Instagram.
