Meta* is launching its answer to Twitter, threads. Facebook**’s parent company announced the new microblogging app on July 3, putting it up for “pre-order” on the Apple App Store ahead of its U.S. release on Thursday (July 6). The worldwide release is set for Friday.
By the way, marketers are in luck, because there’s never been a better time for a Twitter competitor to emerge.
The platform has been suffering from a severe user churn since Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of Twitter in October 2022. Competitors like Mastodon, Hive Social, and others have managed to lure some Twitter users to their platforms — especially after Musk ordered unpopular changes like the removal of unpaid blue checkmarks and a new content moderation policy. This week, after Twitter imposed limits on viewing tweets, Bluesky, a decentralized Twitter-like social network created by former Twitter employees after Musk’s mass layoffs, became overloaded despite requiring only an invite code to sign up, and was forced to suspend “accepting” new users.
Still, no rival app has emerged as a serious contender to knock Twitter off the top spot in its category. But Mark Zuckerberg’s social media empire, with its billions of real users, poses a much bigger immediate challenge. Threads debuts at a time when Twitter has dramatically reduced its workforce, is suffering from outages, and is saddled with big (despite Musk’s streamlining) expenses. And unlike smaller startups, Meta has the know-how, the deep pockets, the powerful cloud infrastructure, and the people to keep Threads running smoothly from day one.