Thread Lightly: How to Choose the Right Platforms for Your Business

Threads has suddenly jumped on the scene, even quicker than Meta were anticipating. But is this simply another case of shiny object syndrome? Just because it’s popular, does that actually mean that your business suddenly needs to pivot your strategy and jump on the bandwagon? So in today’s podcast, we’re going to have a look at how to determine what platforms your business should focus its marketing efforts on, along with a look into the positives and the risks of adapting your strategy today to include the shiny new social platform, Threads.

Hi, my name’s Jordan McFadyen. Welcome to the Marketing Mindset podcast. This podcast is designed to help you navigate this cluttered world of marketing and help challenge you to actually move away from random acts of marketing towards planning more an intentional marketing strategy.

And today, we’re reflecting on the, let’s say, quick introduction of Threads, this latest social media platform, which has really burst into the scene over the past week at the time of recording. So the main point I want to get across in today’s podcast is that just because it’s new doesn’t mean that your business needs to be using it. And we’re going to explain this in a bit more detail over the course of the podcast. But that has been a big question that has been on the lips of many businesses this past week, is how do you actually determine whether Threads, or any other new social platform, or any platform in general, is something that you need to jump on and be a part of?

So how do we determine that? So that’s one of the big things that we’re going to focus on today. But first, let’s just actually have a look at Threads, for the people that haven’t been online for the past week and haven’t seen Threads kind of popping up everywhere. Or you’ve seen it and you just don’t know anything about what’s actually happening or what’s actually going on.

So Threads is literally a new micro-blogging platform, is what they call it. It’s created by Meta, so it’s the same people as Facebook and Instagram. And it’s been dubbed a public conversations app. So pretty much very similar to what Twitter is now as well. So there are a couple of differences with Twitter though, things that you should be aware about. Mainly, what Threads does and Twitter doesn’t do is Threads does allow for content up to 500 characters in their posts. And you could also actually post five-minute videos to the platform as well.

And the other good thing about Threads is that the sign-up process has been easy, as users sign up to Threads through their Instagram account, which means that if a business is already verified, the verification also carries over. And the adoption has been really fast because of that fact as well, because the sign-up process has been so easy.

So another major feature being teased as part of Threads as well is what’s called the Fediverse. Now this is a bit random. And essentially what this means is it’s going to allow interaction with users across different platforms. So this is really new. Details on what the Fediverse actually is, is really sketchy and brand new, so we’re not going to know more about that until a bit later on. But from early reports, what I’ve been reading is that the term Fediverse is essentially derived from a combination of the word federation and the word universe. And it’s going to refer to this collection of decentralised social media platforms that we operate using open standards and open protocols.

So unlike traditional social media networks now, which are owned and operated by a single company, they’re saying that the Fediverse will allow users to interact and communicate across multiple platforms seamlessly. So like I say, detail is very sketchy. That’s pretty much all I know about that. But we’ll kind of cover that as we learn more over time.

However, in general, Threads, as you can tell, has experienced significant growth since its launch. And like I say, it really is very similar to what Twitter is. So literally under a week ago at the time of recording, we had so many users transition from Instagram due to that easy sign-up process, which has been great news for Meta, because they’ve now surpassed around 100 million users already, which does equate to being one of the fastest sign-up processes ever in history.

Even with how ChatGPT exploded onto the scene at the end of last year, Threads has far surpassed that with 100 million users already. Like I say, that’s within a week as well. But the question for users and businesses, and also business marketing strategies, is whether that’s actually going to stick, or is this just another platform to just distract us from our current marketing strategies and distract us to move us away from other social media platforms?

The sudden growth has even surprised Meta, and I think that’s really important to know. According to the head of Instagram, his name is Adam Mosseri, and he was quoted as saying, “We don’t even know if this thing is retentive yet. We couldn’t be more psyched about the launch week, but it’s also really important that we have perspective about what matters over the long run.”

So even with that quote from the head of Instagram saying that they don’t even know if the product is retentive yet or not is, well, not only a concern, but it’s also something that you just need to be a little bit mindful of. So the question then becomes, is Threads even worth you and your business dropping everything to join and to pivot your marketing strategy? Is it time for you to pivot and master yet another platform? Or is this simply just another distraction?

So firstly, what we’re going to do is we’re going to discover some of the positives, and we’ll also look at some of the risks of the platform as it stands, of Threads. And this is based on what we know right now. It is really new, so we don’t know too much about it. And there’s always details changing and always details coming out. So we don’t have a lot of details about the positives and the risks, but there’s a few things that we can already get already.

So firstly, the positives of incorporating Threads to your strategy. So the first one is, as I mentioned at the start, it’s really easy to set up an account. It’s easy to verify it. And it’s easy for you to jump on and have a test and a bit of a play. Businesses, if you do have an Instagram account, you can easily sign up. You’ll receive immediate verification if you already were verified on Instagram. It pulls across all your bio or your logo and everything like that. And it really does simplify the onboarding process, facilitates follower migration perfectly. So it takes all your followers from Instagram over to Threads. It does all of that really quickly. And that is one of the key reasons why it has blown up and got so many users so fast.

So the other positive is there is that extended content flexibility, unlike Twitter. So if you have been using Twitter as part of your marketing strategy (and it’s not a big part of a lot of New Zealand companies’ marketing strategies, we don’t see it a lot), but if you have been using it, Threads will allow posts of up to 500 characters now, and also five-minute videos. And what this does is this does offer brands a bit more flexibility to actually communicate their messages. However, on the flip side, this also means that you need to actually then evaluate whether this type of communication style is what your business and your strategy actually does best, and what actually is going to resonate with your audience.

If we have a look at Twitter, it can be really good for big SaaS companies when they have an outage or anything like that. They can kind of put customer service messages out really quickly. And it seems to be just a better kind of portal for that type of communication. And Threads, you never know, it might turn out to be quite a similar thing for how brands use it as it evolves over the time.

One of the other positives of Threads is that it has had pretty good popularity, and it is a bonus that it is popular. People are joining Threads literally in the millions, even in its early days, which is providing an increased visibility and increased engagement opportunity for brands and for businesses. And this is a positive, but it is also a risk, as early adoption can actually help brands establish a strong presence on the platform. However, the brands that are going to excel at this in the early days are going to be the ones with really strong Instagram presence anyway.

Because as I said in the earlier point, it’s really easy to migrate, and essentially you’re going to migrate from your Instagram account and all your followers kind of come across with you. So if you are a large brand with a lot of followers, obviously that’s going to be a positive. This then becomes another communication tool for those large brands with large followers, as the limited discoverability, which I’ll chat about shortly, is going to make reach much more challenging for smaller businesses. So smaller brands may be at a bit of a disadvantage in the early days of Threads.

The other positive is advertising. There is potential that advertising is still on the cards. It’s not available just yet, and they’re saying they’re going to keep it advertising-free until they hit around a billion users. But it’s expected that Threads will eventually roll out an ad platform eventually. It makes sense. Obviously, that’s what Meta does. They’re a business. They’re in here to try and make cash as well. And users aren’t going to like this, but advertisers and marketers like myself, we can actually see the benefits of being able to advertise on a new platform like Threads, if your audience is there. We’ll go into that shortly as well.

So there are some benefits of being able to advertise on a platform like that, and seamlessly integrating all your ads with your existing Facebook and Instagram ad accounts. Because I would assume that if we’re going to be able to advertise on Threads in the future, that it’s going to be all part of that same ads platform that we currently manage Facebook and Instagram ads from.

The other positive, depending on where your business and your marketing strategy is right now, is that for tone and content experimentation and testing, it can actually be a really interesting time to do that. If your business is currently going through a bit of a phase of testing and trialling new variations of your tone of voice or your branding, Threads has kind of come out as a bit of a fresh and, I guess, playful kind of vibe to it. And it could actually provide you with a good opportunity to experiment with slightly less risk, especially as a smaller business, smaller brand. As I said, your reach might be quite limited in these first early days. So it could be a good opportunity for you to experiment and to trial some new tone of voice and branding on there.

Big brands, we’re already seeing, are doing this. For example, Salesforce, I noticed, they typically share more serious business-related content, but they seem to be trialling a much more playful tone on Threads as well. So this could be a good little playground, I guess, for testing, if you are kind of going through that phase in your business and your marketing strategy.

So that’s some of the positives that we’ve seen so far. But of course, there are always risks as well involved to adding Threads to your marketing strategy. And that big one is that the future is uncertain. It’s even uncertain for Meta. They’ve been surprised about how much has taken off. But as that quote that we shared at the start, they don’t even know if the platform itself is retentive, if people are actually going to come back and actually get into the habit of actually using it.

And like any new platform, Threads is going to run that risk of losing interest over time. And as that excitement kind of fades, are people going to stick around? If we think back, how’s your Mastodon or your Clubhouse strategy working out for you? A couple of social media platforms that really hit the scene with a big bang. A lot of early adoption, a lot of people getting in there and trialling it and adjusting their strategies. And it just kind of wore off over time. Retention just wasn’t there. It didn’t become a part of people’s everyday habits. And this goes back to my point that this could simply become just more of a distraction away from your key marketing goals and your KPIs and your strategy. So that is a big risk, that you’re going to get distracted.

The other risk is the chances of discoverability are really limited. And this goes back to what I was saying earlier. Currently Threads isn’t offering the ability to actually be able to search for topics or trending hashtags, which could potentially limit content discoverability. Now, like I said earlier, this is pretty early days that we’re recording this, one week into the launch. So they’re kind of adding new ways and new discoverability things all the time. So this could change. It’s simply too soon for us to tell, and changes are being made constantly. But at the time of recording, you can’t search for topics or trending hashtags or anything like that.

So larger brands with larger followings, they may see much better results from jumping on and adapting to the strategy right away, as they can leverage their larger audiences, they can leverage their capability, they can leverage their increased budgets, all of that to be able to make sure that they can be discoverable on this new platform. However, for small businesses and creators, currently, it does appear to be a bit of a challenge to be able to use the platform to increase your brand visibility. At the moment, it’s more a different communication tool to discuss and communicate with your existing Instagram followers. That’s what it appears to be at the moment.

And also, one of the other big risks is that overinvestment. And overinvestment is always a bit of a risk. As the future of the platform is so uncertain, putting a lot of your resources into Threads right away could actually lead to quite an unwarranted drain on your resources. At the end of the day, we’re in this really crunchy time economically as it is. So adding a new strategy and investing a lot of time or a lot of money or a lot of your resources into a platform that is still literally being discovered, and just finding its feet and finding its ideal audience, it is a big risk for businesses. And especially if you’ve got tighter budgets or a lack of capabilities, a smaller team, it is a big risk for you to suddenly flip the switch and change your strategy overnight just because everyone else seems to be doing the same.

So that begs the question there. So even if we look past Threads and we just think about any kind of new platform, and you’re thinking about your strategy in general, and you’re thinking, should we be investigating going into LinkedIn, or going into Facebook or Instagram, because we’re not on those? Or should we be looking at Pinterest as a new platform? So how do you decide if Threads or any new platform is actually going to be right for your business at the end of the day?

And finding the best marketing channel for your business is really like trying to hit a bit of a moving target at the moment, it feels. The key really isn’t in the multitude of channels that you have available and that you can be on, but more it’s about how you actually decide where to focus your marketing efforts. The issue that we have as businesses and as marketers is that there is so much to choose from. It’s not even just social media. We’ve got SEO, we’ve got PPC marketing, social media marketing, email marketing, the list goes on.

And while these platforms offer new promising opportunities, it’s important to actually remember that what works for one business may not necessarily actually work for another as well. And this is where the challenge actually comes in, identifying which channels align with your business’s objectives, your business’s target audience and brand persona as well.

So here’s a bit of a thought starter for you: four key ideas that I suggest you actually have a look at when you’re determining the platforms where you’re going to hone your marketing activities. So the first one is actually understanding your audience. Your audience should literally be the core of your marketing strategy. So if you don’t have this nailed, it’s like you’re applying a hit-and-hope marketing strategy right now, which just isn’t going to work over the long-term scale.

You want to actually determine, where does your ideal customer, or your audience, or your ideal client, or your personas, where do they spend most of their time online? What type of content are they consuming right now? Which social media platform do they use? Which platform are they avoiding right now as well? By understanding your audience’s preferences, you can really tailor your marketing strategy to really effectively reach those people.

And look, we’ve shared so many different articles on how to build your audience persona. So I’ll make sure that we link that on the text version of this podcast on our website as well, so you can actually go back and learn about how you can actually create and build that audience persona and understand your audience in more detail. However, I do need to say that that is the key that you first need to be focusing on. So before you actually have a look at different platforms and where you should be marketing, understanding your audience is really key.

The second one is actually then sitting down and defining again your overall business and marketing goals, thinking about, what do you actually want to achieve from your marketing efforts? Are you looking for brand visibility? Are you looking for engagement with your customers or your clients? So you’re looking for lead generation, direct sales to your e-commerce store? Your goals are going to significantly influence where you should be marketing, and also how.

So for example, if you’re looking to boost brand visibility, you might be going to places like Instagram or Google Ads. They could be really highly effective for you. Or for B2B lead generation, you could obviously be going to places like LinkedIn; thinking about your email marketing might be a much more suitable platform for you as well. So if you don’t have an understanding of what you actually want to achieve with your marketing, you’ll essentially never get there. And again, that goes back to what I said earlier around that whole hit-and-hope strategy. If you don’t understand the audience and you don’t know what you actually want to achieve out of your marketing, then what’s the point at the end of the day?

The other one is then sitting down and assessing your industry, sitting down and looking at your competitors, and also your offerings, and the services and the products that you actually offer to the market. Your industry and your product or your service offerings, and also your competitors, they are really big factors in where you’re actually going to determine where you should be marketing.

So let’s say that you operate in a real niche industry with complex offerings or a complex product. Content marketing through blogs or webinars might work really well as a way to try and educate potential customers or clients, or try to display authority or display trust. Whereas on the other hand, if you offer something more, I don’t know, visually appealing, you have products that are really aesthetically pleasing, or lifestyle services or something like that, showcasing those on a nicely curated Instagram feed, or even a Pinterest or anything like that, could be where you want to attract more of that attention. It really depends on the product that you have, that service and how that’s displayed.

Take note of your competitors, have a look at where they are, assess your place in the market, what’s your unique selling points, and this is going to help your business stand out from the competition on that same platform as well.

And then that fourth thing I want you to think about is really going back and evaluating your own resources and your business’s capabilities as well. Because when you’re choosing to go onto a new platform, that’s one of those key considerations. Can you actually afford, or do you have the capabilities, to even do it? Effective marketing requires consistent effort and consistent resources. And this is why, with my suggestion with Threads, is that, honestly, I think you need to ensure that you have the capability, you have the resources, you have the budget to actually adjust and to pivot your strategy.

And understanding what your business can afford and where you have the expertise to actually maintain that consistent presence. And remember that, I guess, kicking off on a platform and then dropping it off that platform in the same breath, it may actually be more detrimental to your brand than simply not going on the platform in the first place and just sticking to your existing strategy.

So those are the four things that I’ll get you to kind of have a think about. And the question, where should my business be marketing, or should I jump on Threads because everyone else is? It doesn’t really have a one-size-fits-all answer. Instead, what you need to do is you do need to carefully consider those few key points to help you guide your decision.

So those points, again: know your audience, understand their online behaviour, their preferences. Set those clear goals and make sure you stick to them. Again, those marketing channels should really align with your business objectives. Evaluate your industry, your offerings, your competitors. Determine which channels are the most suitable based on what you’re selling and who you’re selling to. And then assess those resources that you have available to you as well. Make sure you can support your chosen marketing strategies over the long term.

And above all else, test. There’s no silver bullet here, so testing really is the key. Remember that digital marketing isn’t about being everywhere. It’s more about being where your audience is and engaging with them effectively. So sure, jump on Threads. Test the platform. Develop your own tone of voice and an audience on there. But ensure that you are sticking to your strategy, and ensure that you’re constantly testing engagement, testing effectiveness with your core audience. And that you’re ensuring that the time and the investment you’re putting into the platform, or any new platform that you join, is actually helping you to step closer to your overall strategy and your overall marketing goals.

So hopefully that’s given you a little bit to think about in terms of Threads as a platform, how that works. And also whether Threads is potentially the right platform, or how you can decide to go on any new platform at any one time. Even if you’re in business and you’re just kind of starting out and you’re trying to think, where do I start? Do I just set up a Facebook page because everyone else does? It might not be where your business audience is and where they’re currently hanging out. So I do think going through those steps as a start is a great point to kind of kick off from.

And look, if you do want to chat about your strategy or learn more about how to actually build customer personas as part of your strategy, that’s obviously what we do best at Done By Nine. You can head across to our website and you can contact us, contact a member of the team, and we can take you through that process. Or, of course, you can learn from all our other podcasts and from our other blogs and our website as well. It’s donebynine.com. You’re more than welcome to reach out at any time, and we’re more than happy to take you through how we work and how we can actually help step you closer to your overall marketing goals.

And I do hope that you’ve been able to take away some thoughts, even a bit of an introduction as to what Threads is, if you’ve seen it everywhere over the past week, and whether you’re actually going to jump on and give it a bit of a go as part of your marketing strategy as well. We look forward to seeing you on next week’s episode of the Marketing Mindset podcast.