![]() It also launched a day earlier than planned, creating a mad scramble to get on. And people could pre-install the app, meaning they’d get a push notification when it hit the app store. Everyone who reads the news, one of Twitter’s primary use cases, knew Threads was coming. Meta strategically seeded Threads with hundreds of “Threads is coming” articles over the past two weeks. The hardest part about building any new network is getting started - this concept called “network effects” exists for a reason. On TikTok, the best videos could instantly reach the entire user base. Creators with ~100k followers on Snapchat eventually switched to posting the same content for their ~1 million followers on Instagram. This was similar to when Instagram added Stories and gave creators instant distribution advantages over Snapchat. ![]() Despite fewer users, the product decisions above gave new TikTok creators instant distribution advantages over existing platforms. A common way to beat a competitor with a distribution advantage is to build a better product that eventually surpasses their distribution. In business, superior distribution (reach with customers, users, etc) usually wins in the long run. TikTok, on the other hand, promotes all content regardless of who made it or how many followers they have. "In previous eras, most of the spoils went to the platform’s earliest adopters - mining value gets harder as the platform ages. Hyper fast user onboarding and no friend graph let it use the entirety of time spent in-app allocating this social capital. Alex Zhu, Musical.ly founder and now Head of Product at TikTok, likens the process to creating a new country and giving a greenfield of opportunities to a new class of creators. Extremely short videos, algorithmic discovery on the FYP, the muted importance of a follower graph, and constant traffic into the app via heavy marketing, cross-platform posting, promotion by influencers, and (eventually) habit allowed TikTok to deliberately control the allocation of social capital across the network to its most talented creators, both new or old, as new users poured into the app. ![]() In the early days, everyone on its operations teams was tasked with roping in influencers (and long-rumored to have found ways to pay them to post)…ĭeliberate product decisions compounded this process. It went after each market's biggest social influencers, and quickly built them social capital on the app. Three years ago I wrote about how and why TikTok did this: Twitter started borrowing this algorithmic feed years ago, and its gotten more aggressive under Elon’s ownership. They also made the feed like TikTok, where the follower graph doesn’t matter, and anyone (follower or not) can potentially see any piece of content. īut it wasn’t even the smartest thing they did. And for the average consumer, a pre-populated follower graph also makes it easier to get started. For the average IG power user, this makes Threads a much better option than starting from scratch on Twitter so as long as they have followers using it. What I think is most interesting is Threads automatically brings over their Instagram follower graph. ![]() It was one of the smartest things Meta did with this launch, as I mentioned a few weeks ago: Now, if they do want to experiment with text, Threads gives them all their followers immediately. The problem has always been that most of them already have large followings on Instagram, and Twitter was too much work, and not to mention a completely different content format and meta game. We know Elon has been pushing celebrities who left Twitter to get back on. This meant you needed an IG account to sign-up, and it pre-populated the Threads feed with every account you followed on IG. Threads launched last night on top of Instagram’s social graph. ![]()
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