“I’m very optimistic about how the Threads community is coming together. Early growth was off the charts, but more importantly tens of millions of people now come back daily. That’s way ahead of what we expected.” – Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg
Amid reports of waning interest in Threads after a fiery start, Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg took to the service late Monday to share his confidence in the Twitter rival’s early momentum.
The Road Ahead: Focusing on Basics and Retention
“The focus for the rest of the year is improving the basics and retention,” Zuckerberg said in his Threads post. “It’ll take time to stabilize, but once we nail that, then we’ll focus on growing the community.”
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He further suggested that Meta’s history of success in rolling out new offerings would pay off as the company goes about growing Threads.
“We’ve run this playbook many times (FB, IG, Stories, Reels, etc) and I’m confident Threads is on a good path, too,” Zuckerberg said.
Building Momentum Amidst Initial Challenges
While Threads, a service that lets users send short messages similar to what they can do on Twitter, quickly built up a base of some 100 million users after its rollout earlier this month, third-party reports indicated that the platform was losing steam in the wake of the initial launch.
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Zuckerberg’s Threads also must deal with similar challenges to what Twitter faces, including the need to crack down on misinformation and hateful speech that has already flowed onto the platform, according to a report from Media Matters.