Threads will appeal to everyone who was not on Twitter!

Timing, as they say, is everything. My prediction is that Threads will be a huge success. It has always been a little strange that Twitter had no competition; almost as if companies didn't even try to take it on in some ways. No other business in the world has no competition. While Twitter did compete with others in terms of ad sales, from a product perspective, no one ever took a shot at it... until now.

I have been a massive advocate of Twitter, dedicating years of my life to it effortlessly. I have bantered, opined, argued, and even had some viral moments. Remember the new Garden office tweet? All in all, I have loved it. However, right now, Twitter is under attack from within. The thing with Twitter is that it's elitist or niche. It's for the few rather than the many. There is no continuous influx of new generations picking it up; it only has fans from the past, and these fans are becoming increasingly frustrated, with no one else picking up the slack. Take Facebook, for example; it started with the kids, then the kids moved to Instagram, but don't worry, hundreds of millions of older users filled the gap. Twitter doesn't have that. It purely has an audience of disenfranchised individuals.

Enter Threads. Who does it appeal to? Well, it appeals to the young who are building and enjoying online dialogues, the older users who never got into Twitter but will now be introduced to Threads through every Meta app they come across, and finally, those who resisted Twitter on principle but now have a reason to try an alternative. If you have been on Twitter for over ten years, some of this will resonate with you.

So, who won't go to Threads? Well, Omar Oakes, for one, was clear about his lack of desire to cross the divide. As for me, it's not because I am against Meta or against new things, but because the beauty of Twitter was having a following, being part of the dialogues, and everything that came with it. I have 6,000 followers on Twitter, and they were hard-earned. I didn't buy followers like some people do. No, I gained those followers over a period of time that had a number of forces coming together. On a personal level, it was a decade of presenting at big conferences where the exposure gained me followers. Interestingly, the live-tweeting of conferences has almost entirely dried up, resulting in much less engagement than there used to be. In those days, presenting at a Mediatel event would always leave me with a healthy increase in followers.

There was always so much debate on Twitter, without some of the toxicity we see today, and it caught the imagination of all those in our industry who flooded to Twitter to share and engage with one another. So, through all of that, Twitter was the go-to platform. However, for many, it will be hard to replicate that experience, and that's why I think Threads will probably attract a huge number of new users, rather than existing Twitter users switching platforms.

There is an attachment to the Twitter following one builds. There are so many personalities, friends, and colleagues that enjoy the Twitter community and seek refuge there. So, I ask myself the same question Omar asked: am I just adding yet another platform to consume my time and distract me from real life simply because it's launched? The answer is no.

Will it be a huge success? Absolutely. Good luck to them!