Honeymoon with Twitter rival Threads is over, but Meta Platforms plans ‘retention-boosting hooks’ for messaging app
Meta Platforms plans to make recently launched Twitter rival Threads even more “sticky” to sustain its shrinking user base.
According to Reuters It sat in on an internal town hall meeting between Meta CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg and staff, in which he acknowledged that Threads’ honeymoon phase is over.
Earlier this month, Meta Platforms launched its long-awaited Threads app, to much fanfare from Twitter users frustrated by Elon Musk’s controversial ownership of the platform.
Thread usage
In fact, Threads experienced a surge in user demand shortly after its launch, quickly growing to 112 million users.
The app has also recently been updated.
But Mark Zuckerberg said in a staff conference call on Thursday that the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks after its release, Reuters reported.
That said, user retention for the text-based app was better than executives expected, but “it wasn’t perfect,” Zuckerberg said.
“Obviously, if you have over 100 million people registered, ideally it would be great for all or half of them to stay. We are not there yet,” he said. Told.
Zuckerberg reportedly said he considers the drop in sales “normal” and expects retention to increase as more features are added to the app, such as the desktop version and search functionality.
Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, meanwhile, said Meta has “enhanced retention” to keep users coming back to the app, including “making sure people using the Instagram app see important threads.” He reportedly said he was considering adding more “hooks.”
Zuckerberg also told employees on the conference call that the company’s work on augmented and virtual reality technology to power the Metaverse “isn’t much ahead of schedule, but it’s on track.” said he believed.
The comments come a day after Meta delighted investors with a rosy forecast for revenue growth and an increase in advertising spending.
Battle of Elon Musk
In a call with staff, Zuckerberg answered a question about a proposed “cage match” with Elon Musk, who applied for a public bout, and Zuckerberg reportedly accepted.
“I don’t know if it will work,” Zuckerberg said.
Certainly the feud between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg is notable.
Alex Spiro, an attorney at Company X (owner of Twitter), recently accused Mehta of “deliberate” embezzlement of trade secrets in a letter to Zuckerberg and threatened lawsuits.
In his letter, Spiro claimed that Metaz Thread was built by former Twitter employees who were “deliberately assigned” to develop a “copycat” app.
But Meta has been developing Threads since August 2019, and it’s going to have to work hard enough if it wants to take down Twitter (now known as X).
Twitter is known to have 229 million monthly active users as of May 2022, the last time the company published such figures.
But last November, Elon Musk said tweeted Twitter has approximately 260 million daily active users that can be monetized.
Mastodon, on the other hand, claims to have 1.7 million monthly active users, and Bluesky has over 1 million downloads.
