You can now add another player to the social media marketing landscape: Threads. The company made it known this week that it’s starting to roll out in-feed ads. It was only a matter of time, given that X – Threads’ closest counterpart – employs ad monetization as its primary revenue model.
Beyond that, Meta is all about ads. Adding Threads to the mix is logical for several reasons. For example, it can broaden its overall ad network reach and the variety of options it offers to advertisers. It also creates more inventory and thus a larger footprint for Meta to monetize. All in all, no big surprises.
“On its own, the addition of ads to Threads doesn’t feel like earth-shattering news; I imagine some may be surprised that the platform didn’t already have them,” Soci Sr. Director of Market Insights Damian Rollison told Localogy. “But as a sign of Threads’ growth and increasing viability, it’s certainly significant.”
Natural Direction
As for what its ad program will entail, Meta is in early stages of the rollout – a “limited early test of ads in Threads” as the company stated. But a few things are clear about the program already. For one, the test will kick off with a handful of brands in the U.S. and Japan and likely expand from there.
Ad formats will be in-feed units, similar to what you see on Facebook and Instagram. Given that Threads is a feed-based UX – and Meta has developed a firm playbook around in-feed ads – this approach is a natural direction. In-feed ads also allow lots of room for both content targeting and user targeting.
The former is pretty straightforward – targeting ads based on adjacent content in the feed. The latter involves more art and science (and controversy). Meta will use first-party data – a must in the privacy age – to target ads based on things like your post interactions (think: likes) on all Meta properties.
The larger question is if Threads is here to stay as a legitimate force in the social media wars. All of the above is moot if the audience engagement isn’t there. On that measure, Threads was strong out of the gate, as an alternative to the cultural backlash around X. But will its usage sustain and keep growing?
“I think the jury’s still out,” said Rollison. “I’m not a huge believer, and I suspect the app’s 275 million monthly users are a side effect of Meta’s huge global audience rather than a truly earned phenomenon. My math says that only about 9% of Facebook’s users would have to click over to Threads, which they’re already seeing in their feeds, once a month to hit that number.”
High Gear
Stepping back, Meta’s ability to target ads continues to improve with the help of AI. After it was dealt a blow to its ad targeting when Apple restricted its ability to ingest device-level data, it was forced to retune. This came along at the right time, as AI and large language models were kicking into high gear.
The result is that Meta’s ad targeting – and actual monetization to prove it – is now stronger than ever. This includes several AI-fueled ways to not only target ads but to create them. The latter makes its value proposition to advertisers in that it can streamline their workflows and make them more effective.
Now, all that comes to Threads. Not only will this broaden Meta’s ad inventory, as noted, but it engenders an even larger training ground to refine its AI-ad endeavors. Though this was all logical and expected, there will still be much to watch in the coming months as the proof, as always, will be in the execution.
“The narrative has been that, as Twitter became X and turned off a bunch of users, those users began to seek alternatives like Mastodon and Bluesky; so Meta launched Threads hoping to sweep the competition,” said Rollison. “But in many ways, that story is too linear, and Threads itself doesn’t do enough to differentiate itself as a platform. The trend toward short-form video and other more recent developments have, in many ways, overtaken the old Twitter model and made it seem out of date. In my own experience, the industry conversations that used to happen on X are now taking place on LinkedIn. So Threads has a lot to contend with in terms of fresher-seeming competitors.”
Header image credit: Dave Adamson on Unsplash
