Meta executives have signaled that they don’t see the falloff as worrisome and have said they are working on additional features.
PHOTO: ETIENNE LAURENT/ZUMA PRESS
By Lindsey Choo
July 21, 2023 7:25 am ET
User engagement on Threads has continued to fall after an initial surge in sign-ups, putting pressure on parent Meta Platforms to roll out new features for its nascent microblogging app.
For a second week in a row, the number of daily active users declined on Threads, falling to 13 million, down about 70% from a July 7 peak, according to estimates from market intelligence firm Sensor Tower.
The average time users spend on the iOS and Android apps has also decreased to four minutes from 19 minutes. The average time spent for Android users in the U.S. dropped to five minutes from a peak of 21 minutes on launch day, according to SimilarWeb, a digital data and analytics company.
Twitter’s daily active users remain steady at about 200 million, and average time spent is at 30 minutes a day, according to Sensor Tower estimates.
Meta executives have said they expected an eventual decline after the app gained more than 100 million sign-ups within a week of its launching earlier this month. They have signaled that they don’t see the falloff as worrisome and have said they are working on additional features. Meta aims to increase the number of users and improve the experience before trying to monetize the platform.
“It’s clear by the drop-off that people are seeing they can’t do as much, and there are certain things that they want to be able to do that perhaps they can do on other apps,” said Richard Hanna, a professor at Babson College who studies social-media strategy and digital marketing. There is a need to increase what the app can do, he said.
Some writers and reviewers have said that Threads, which was built using Instagram’s infrastructure, might seem dull to certain users if they choose to follow the same people they follow on Instagram, since some of those accounts may not be posting nearly as frequently as they do on Twitter. Company brands have been prevalent so far on Threads, an issue that some users have complained about on the platform.
The official Threads account on Thursday reiterated the company’s plans to add new features. It reposted a video of Adam Mosseri —the head of Meta’s Instagram unit, which produced Threads—from about a week ago in which he promised a laundry list of new features.
“ICYMI: we’re working on getting you those new features,” the Threads post said. Among the features promised by Mosseri are support for multiple accounts, the ability to edit posts and a chronological feed option like the ones on Instagram and Facebook.
A Meta spokeswoman declined to comment.
While it is still early days for the app, it has already made initial efforts to differentiate itself from Twitter, positioning itself as a platform with a different ethos that doesn’t encourage politics or hard news.
Threads has more time to succeed than other startups because it can continue to invest in the app’s success while it adds features and fixes any issues, analysts said. “Meta definitely has the patience, they have the money, and they have the engineering talent,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, a market research firm.
While the company has unveiled new features, some were recently delayed because of technical issues.
Cameron Roth, a software engineer at Instagram, posted to Threads on Tuesday that the iOS version of the app dropped an update that had many new features—which included translation, a follows tab on the activity feed, and a new subscription feature for unfollowed users.
However, Roth said on Wednesday in a separate post that the update rollout was paused while the company investigates an issue causing networking requests to fail.
Leaders at Meta have stressed that while the response in user engagement in the initial launch has exceeded expectations, they are giving priority to stabilization before engagement.
Mosseri said in a post on Threads last week that the “focus right now is not engagement, which has been amazing, but getting past the initial peak and trough we see with every new product, and building new features, dialing in performance, and improving ranking.”
Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg echoed the sentiments in a post on Threads Monday. The company is focused on stabilizing before focusing on growing the community, he said.
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