Threads Seeks To Put More Emphasis on Followers To Address Creator Concerns
With Twitter clone Bluesky on the rise, thatâs seemingly spurred Threads into action, with Metaâs own Twitter-like app rolling out a range of updates that seem to be specifically designed to address concerns which many have cited as reasons as to why they find Bluesky more appealing.
Earlier this week, Threads rolled out custom, keyword-based feeds to all users, a much requested feature, while itâs now also prompting users to review their political content settings.
Which, in the wake of the U.S. election, is now a less risky element, and active prompts like this could help to address user requests to make the app a more real-time feed of updates, of all kinds.
And today, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri has announced another change that could make Threads feel even more like Twitter past.
As per Mosseri:
âWe are rebalancing ranking to prioritize content from people you follow, which will mean less recommended content from accounts you donât follow and more posts from the accounts you do starting today.â
This has been another element of Threads that many have criticized in comparison to Bluesky, that you canât default to the âFollowingâ feed on Threads. Thatâs because algorithmic recommendations drive a lot more engagement, which, in turn, also makes following, as a concept, less relevant in the modern social media landscape.
But many Threads users have complained that theyâve been struggling to grow their audience in the app, so the Threads team is now trying to address this, by putting more emphasis on followers, and making following a stronger driver of reach.
Which could have benefits in helping users build their own audience in the app, but it will also impact overall engagement on Threads.
Which Mosseri also acknowledges:
âFor you creators out there, you should see unconnected reach go down and connected reach go up.â
Mosseri further notes that this is âa work in progressâ and as âbalancing the ability to reach followers and overall engagement is trickyâ.
Because, again, Meta has seen significant engagement increases on both Facebook and IG (and presumably Threads) due to the insertion of AI-recommended posts from profiles that you donât follow, which now make up 50% of the content in peopleâs Instagram feeds.
So Meta would seemingly be making this move begrudgingly, in order to address concerns raised by users. And while Bluesky currently only has a fraction of Threadsâ audience (20 million users versus 275 million on Threads), there has clearly been a significant rise in interest in the rival app, which, again, does seem to be pushing the Threads team to reassess their approach to some degree.
Though it wonât be switching to a full chronological feed of posts from profiles that youâve chosen to follow as the default. The âFollowingâ feed will remain secondary, because again, Meta knows that its algorithmic âFor Youâ feed drives more engagement. Â
But really, thatâs the key element that Threads needs, because right now, it lacks the freshness that Twitter once did, that real time pulse feel, where the constantly updating stream of tweets kept you connected to the latest events and happenings in your world, and your topics of interest.
Unfortunately for former Twitter users, that era has now passed, because of the popularity of algorithmic feeds. Sure, Threads could enable users to default to the âFollowingâ stream, but as Mosseri notes, engagement would decline. Pushing a stream of the most engaging posts, aligned to your interests, is a bigger winner for the app.
But it is different from what Twitter had once been.
Thatâs not to say that itâs better, as a lot of the recommended posts you get served are time-wasting junk. But more time spent equals more ad exposure for Meta, and itâd be difficult for Meta to ignore that in order to refocus on a pure âFollowingâ feed instead.
But if it did, that would be the thing that really enables users to build their own audiences in the app. If you had to follow a profile to see their posts, and effectively curate your own feed, follower counts would inevitably go up, and fast, which would be a major step towards re-creating that Twitter feel, and winning over top creators.
But instead, Metaâs going to try some compromise measures, which wonât be the same, but may address at least some creator concerns around follower counts.
