Threads got 10 million+ signups in the first 7 hours of ‘launching’ – Here are my thoughts on what they did and what you should take away from it (yup, I’m gonna be that guy, but pay attention bc this will help you think about your business)
1️⃣ Threads is not brand new. They did not start from scratch.
They built/bought/grew Instagram for 12 years and got it to 1.21 billion monthly active users (as of 2021, according to Statista).
It is a new product in the Meta product suite.
It’s more like sales numbers for a new iPhone vs a new tech startup. Don’t get yourself confused.
2️⃣ They made the signup EXTREMELY seamless. It takes all of 30 seconds to create your account, import your existing IG bio, and even the IG accounts you follow so you aren’t starting with a blank account and empty feed.
This is extremely important – how easy is it for a customer to get started? What is their Time To Value (how quickly are they satisfied and feel ‘paid off’ from the action of getting started)
3️⃣ Market Gap / Opportunity + Newsjacking – Twitter has been in the news regularly since Elon took over. Lots of ‘chaos’ regarding changes across the board with the platform.
This meant that people were getting frustrated with the change of their experience and would be open minded to an alternative (creating opportunity to siphon customers over)
PLUS Meta was able to newsjack and grab a prominent position in the media as “Instagram’s Version Of Twitter” (free marketing via PR coverage)
That positioning also made it easy for people to understand and categorize what it is going to be and how they would potentially use it.
4️⃣ Jason Portnoy made a great point (on Threads) that there is a very small learning curve to using it because it’s already very familiar to social media users (with differences and nuances of course)
Takeaways for your business:
💡Build your audience of ideal clients who Know/Like/Trust you and love using your products/services
💡Identify things they are doing/buying elsewhere (that are relevant to how you can serve them) and build a product/service for them
💡Monitor for gaps in the market and what people/media are buzzing about so that you can jump in with breadcrumbs to lead customers over to you
💡Make it as easy as possible for customers to get started / expand with you