It’s not hard to notice what a juggernaut Threads has become in the social media space. Since first launching in early July 2023, the Meta-owned platform has successfully courted many netizens disillusioned with the much longer-established microblogging site X.
Of course, that app has been thrown into turmoil since being acquired by Tesla CEO Elon Musk in late 2022. However, recent figures have hinted at the true scale of the damage wreaked upon what used to be officially known as Twitter — and how competitor Threads has flourished in the meantime.
Threads: an emerging giant?
Within a day of launching, Threads attracted 30 million users, in the process becoming the most rapidly downloaded app in history. Before the month’s halfway point, Threads had garnered more than 100 million users — “way beyond our expectations,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg enthused.
Though the popularity of Threads subsequently fluctuated during the course of 2023, the app (available on smartphones as well as in web form) since appears to have turned a corner.
According to Appfigures data shared by TechCrunch, the Threads mobile app was daily clocking up over half a million installs across both iOS and Android by late December.
More recently, on February 25th, the app was installed 342,228 times on iOS and an even heftier 486,803 occasions from Google Play. That same day, the X app saw just 112,625 and 225,408 downloads on iOS and from Google Play respectively.
Yes, that’s right — that day, Threads was downloaded almost three times more often than X on iOS and more than twice as often as X on Google Play. In fact, since Twitter was rebranded as X last summer, Threads’ day-by-day install count has consistently surpassed that of X.
The former Twitter continues its fall from grace
On the face of it, X remains a thriving hive of activity. As Meta announced its earnings for 2023’s fourth financial quarter, Zuckerberg indicated that Threads had 130 million monthly active users (MUAs) — and this number looks likely to have risen since.
How does this all compare to X? According to the company itself, its own MUA tally was 500 million as of autumn 2023. More recently, X claimed that its traffic had soared during the weekend of Super Bowl LVIII, a major event on the American sports calendar.
Nonetheless, findings of a study by cybersecurity firm CHEQ suggest that a massive proportion — potentially even most — of X’s traffic during the Super Bowl could have resulted from bots rather than human users. This could be a major cause of concern for marketers using the platform.
On which social media platforms should your brand be active?
As ever, this can very much depend on the nature of your brand. A restaurant, for example, might want to literally show its food on image-centric sites like Instagram rather than microblogging sites.
In any case, by consulting our social media marketing experts, you can help to ensure that your brand gets noticed on platforms where its target audience is especially likely to hang out.
