Inside Threads marketing strategies—how brands are prioritizing the platform

July marked the one-year anniversary of Meta’s abrupt introduction of Threads, the social media giant’s text-based platform designed to rival X, formerly Twitter. The initial hype around Threads, which drove 70 million users and dozens of brands to sign up for the platform within 48 hours of its launch, may have faded. But for a number of brands—including Cinnabon, mental health app Calm and Life360, a location-sharing app for families—Threads has grown into a pivotal piece of their social media strategies. Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs “Because we’ve grown such an amazing community [on Threads], it’s a great priority for us,” said Jane Hong, head of social at Calm, which has more than tripled its audience from 200,000 followers in the two weeks after Threads’ launch to more than 645,000 currently. “I think what’s resonated most is the really human tone that we’ve taken for our content,” she added. “We never want to feel like we’re a brand that’s talking at you—we very much want to feel like we’re another friend in your feed that’s creating content for you to enjoy.” Post by @calm View on Threads Dozens of major brands that set up Threads profiles in the hours after its launch, including Wendy’s, American Eagle, Taco Bell, Ulta Beauty and Sour Patch Kids, have maintained a steady presence on the platform over the past year. Today, these brands typically post at least two or three times per week on Threads—often text posts they cross-post to X. Also read: 20 brands resonating with Gen Z Only a handful of larger brands, such as Dunkin’ and Chili’s, seem to have abandoned Threads in favor of X after the initial wave of brand experimentation with the platform last summer. Dunkin’ hasn’t posted on Threads since September 2023, while Chili’s most recent post on the platform is from August 2023. Just a few brands have gone in the opposite direction—Tinder, for instance, currently makes several Threads posts each week but hasn’t posted any X content in nearly three months. Post by @americaneagle View on Threads Calm, as well as Cinnabon and Life360, currently focus their Threads strategies on building brand affinity through a blend of extensive community management and lighthearted, conversational posts that would be right at home in a group chat. “It’s really a chance for [consumers] to see us as humans behind the brand, not just ‘Here’s a product, look at it,’ or ‘here’s every [limited-time offer],’” said Hannah Gregus, social media manager for Cinnabon and Carvel at their parent company, GoTo Foods. And because Threads still lacks paid advertising, community management and creating engaging organic social content are the only tools social media managers currently have at their disposal, said Nick Miaritis, chief client officer at VaynerMedia. That effectively puts brands “on an even playing field, in a way that early platforms and [organic] advertising demanded,” he said. “You’re not paying to get in front of people.” (Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, wrote on Threads in April that “we definitely plan to bring ads to Threads.”) It’s an approach that closely mirrors the typical brand playbook in the early days of X. But as dozens of brands have deprioritized or completely abandoned advertising on X due to brand safety concerns (despite its owner Elon Musk’s best efforts to win back advertisers), some have instead turned to Threads to fill the Twitter-shaped hole in their social strategies. See all of the 2024 Small Agency award winners here Life360, for instance, continues to post content on X in addition to Threads—but roughly four months ago, the brand started to view X as a platform to simply repost its popular Threads content rather than the reverse, said Brittany Lamp, director of brand, content & community. “We’ve been on Twitter as a brand for years, and we were never able to really see the engagement on Twitter that we’ve seen on Threads, by a lot,” she said. Life360’s posts on Threads regularly rack up hundreds, sometimes thousands, of likes, while likes on its X posts hover in the single digits. Life360 has 23,000 followers on X compared to 38,000 on Threads. Post by @life360 View on Threads For Life360, “Threads is starting to replace Twitter,” Lamp said. “When Threads was new and we were just getting started, Twitter was still our focus. But I would just say that the priorities have flip-flopped—we now create first and foremost for Threads. I think the people who are coming over [to Threads] from Instagram are just a little more primed to engage with our content versus a legacy platform like Twitter.” Calm remains active on X but has built up a larger following and drawn in more engagement across its posts on Threads. And Cinnabon, despite having a much larger audience on X than Threads (230,000 versus 72,000), often garners a similar number of likes, comments and reposts on its content across both platforms. Threads has rolled out several features in the past year to bring its user interface closer to X’s, such as a trending topics feed and a hashtag system—though unlike X, users can currently only attach one hashtag to each post, Miaritis said. X had 600 million monthly active users as of May, according to Musk, while Threads is inching closer to the 200-million mark, Mark Zuckerberg said on a second-quarter earnings call Wednesday. “We’re making steady progress towards building what looks like it’s going to be another major social app,” Zuckerberg said during the call. “We’re seeing deeper engagement” due to the rollout of new features and “enhance[d] content recommendation systems,” he later added, “and I’m quite pleased with the trajectory here.” Most members of that growing userbase aren’t the Gen Z consumers brands typically court on social media. In a survey from youth market research firm YPulse, 29% of 13-to-39-year-olds reported using X, while just 9% said they regularly log into Threads. The oldest Gen Zers are around 27 years old. But the group of consumers who are routinely scrolling through Threads and interacting with brands on the platform are a “highly engaged audience,” Lamp said. On Threads, users “just seem more open to engaging with brands on social media,” she said. “Threads and Twitter are just two very, very different platforms, and the followers we have on Threads, they just seem more social. They jump into the comment section and have a much higher repost rate. They’re just more primed to engage.” Post by @life360 View on Threads Calm, too, often participates in “direct, two-way conversations with [its] community” on Threads, Hong said. Calm’s followers frequently tag the brand in Threads posts in hopes that the brand will respond, she said. “That kind of community engagement is not necessarily indicative of Twitter culture, which is very much about responding to what’s happening in terms of current events in real-time.” But that isn’t to say Calm doesn’t participate in any real-time pop culture conversations on Threads, Hong said. On the night of the June presidential debate, her team made a series of posts encouraging users to practice self-care after the event. Cinnabon, meanwhile, referenced the “Twilight” series in a Threads post on the day of the solar eclipse in April. Post by @cinnabon View on Threads A content testing ground Users can post photos, videos and other media in addition to text on Threads, but the majority (63%) of all Threads posts are text-only, according to platform data. Text posts often perform best for Cinnabon, Calm and Life360, too, which allows the three brands to push out multiple posts per day because they’re far less time consuming than producing TikTok videos or Instagram Reels. Calm posts at least once each day on Threads but will occasionally make multiple posts on the same day, as the brand did the night of the presidential debate, Hong said. Life360 typically posts twice per day, Lamp said, while Cinnabon makes roughly three posts each week, Gregus said. Being able to pump out social content more quickly on Threads has also led the three brands to leverage the platform as a kind of testing ground for posts they can then repurpose for TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. Life360 started rounding up screenshots of its most popular Threads posts into Instagram carousels a few months ago. These posts have generated tons of engagement, including more shares than Life360 usually sees from its Instagram content, prompting the brand to create these carousel posts once a week, Lamp said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Life360 (@life360) Cinnabon also turns Threads text posts into content for its other channels, particularly Facebook, Gregus said. Cinnamon roll-related memes are also a large part of the brand’s Threads content and are often repurposed across Facebook and Instagram, she said. But Cinnabon also leverages Threads as a space for content that may not fit its more curated Instagram feed and wouldn’t resonate with its Facebook audience—such as a meme revealing the social media manager of the Cinnabon Threads account is, in fact, a cinnamon roll with an iPhone. “What we’re finding is the more you participate [on Threads], the more reach you get,” though the inner workings of the Threads algorithm are still ambiguous, VaynerMedia’s Miaritis said. “We’re seeing brands with small, small follower bases that get, on average, small amounts of attention or reach, suddenly getting a lot of reach every few times they post … [Threads] presents, in a non-paid environment, the opportunity to get enormous reach.” Along with the murkiness of its algorithm, social media teams have limited visibility into Threads data beyond the number of impressions across their content and vanity metrics such as likes, comments and shares. Meta announced in June that it had opened the Threads application programming interface (API) to all developers, which may soon offer brands more insight into their audience demographics on the platform, among other information. For Cinnabon, the brand’s interactions with consumers on Threads are its primary measure of success, Gregus said. “With social, there’s so many things that you can’t ever track. Not to be cheesy, but something like the joy someone gets when a brand responds to them—that doesn’t necessarily translate to impressions or engagement, but that can build that relationship that makes them care about the brand as more than just a brand that they want to buy something from … On text-based platforms, it’s all about people responding back to you.” Post by @cinnabon View on Threads Over the next three months, VaynerMedia plans to hone in on producing more Threads content for its clients each day to give their posts a better chance of getting greater reach, Miaritis said. With the comparatively low effort of making a text post compared to a short-form video, “there’s no downsides, only upsides” to pushing out multiple Threads posts per day, he said. “I think we’re at a really interesting place where it’s still early and people are still shaping what this platform will be,” Miaritis said. “It’s, I think, a supply and demand, and if you’re a creator or brand, the supply of people creating for [Threads] is not that big. And so with a lot of eyeballs being there—and more coming each day, it sounds like—you have a better probability of being seen” than on more established social platforms, he said.

Inside Threads marketing strategies—how brands are prioritizing the platform

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