Direct-to-consumer olive oil company Graza hasn’t had much luck finding a large audience on X (formerly Twitter) since it joined the platform in 2021. With under 1,000 followers, Graza has primarily used X to connect with other consumer packaged goods professionals and founders, according to Graza Head of Social Media Kendall Dickieson, and to “test concepts before bringing them across other channels,” such as a piece of creative or another idea. 

But despite its struggle to find an expansive audience on X, Dickieson quickly embraced X's latest challenger, Instagram’s text-based platform Threads, when it debuted earlier this month. In less than four weeks, Graza amassed over 7,000 followers—more than seven times larger than its audience on X. 

Graza’s story is similar to that of other DTC companies, which have struggled to break through on X in the way more traditional brands such as Wendy’s or JetBlue have. Historically speaking, the DTC set has found more success on Meta’s photo-based Instagram, where they have been able to build a visual identity around their brand.

As Izzy Yellin, an influencer coordinator at Olipop who is now also on the brand’s Threads team, put it, on Instagram, “we get to kind of transport [the consumer] to the Olipop world when they come onto our page.” She added that it’s “super important” for DTC brands in particular to see them come to life with visuals on Instagram.

Just a few weeks into the platform’s existence, many DTC brands are far more interested in creating content for their brands on Threads than they ever were in X. Several brands said that Threads not only feels like a more brand-safe option but also allows them to seamlessly engage with their pre-existing Instagram followers in new ways. 

Related: How social media managers are approaching Threads

“Being that it was new, I wanted to test it and see how we could do,” Graza's Dickieson said. “Since our tone of voice is very casual and we don’t take ourselves seriously, I thought it could allow us to highlight it best, gain new followers and also talk to brands that we have wanted a relationship with,” she continued.

And although Graza has been active on X for the past few years, Dickieson said Threads is now more beneficial for the brand results-wise than X ever was—even though Threads has only existed for less than a month. 

For Graza, Threads has led to some followers becoming “first-time buyers,” Dickieson said.

“People were like, ‘Why is an olive oil brand taking over my timeline,’ which resulted in sales, but also new followers across platforms,” she said. 

On Threads, DTC brands—which have historically relied on Instagram for much of their marketing strategy—have the chance to “be exposed more to new followers or engage with folks who have followed but may not see your actual content on Instagram,” Dickieson said.

Pull my Thread as I walk away

When a user signs up for Threads, they have the option to follow every account they follow on Instagram. For a brand such as August, a DTC period product brand that has about 181,000 Instagram followers and only roughly 1,000 X followers, this was an immediate point in the Threads column. 

“Within 24 hours on Threads, we surpassed the number of followers we had on Twitter,” said Nadya Okamoto, co-founder of August, in a recent interview before Twitter became X. As of this writing, August has about 10,700 Threads followers. 

“When we got onto Threads, we had all these new followers coming in who have never had a Twitter account,” Okamoto said. 

It’s no secret that DTC brands have historically been reliant on the Meta ecosystem for marketing and sales. Even as many brands boycotted Facebook in 2020 over its hate speech policies, some DTC brands found themselves unable to do so because they relied on the platform so heavily. 

Also read: August makes first marketing hire

August isn’t the only brand that has seen its Instagram following translate to Threads. 

Watch me unravel  

DTC brands' social media teams also have concerns about Twitter's brand safety. Several X advertisers left the platform after Musk took over in October of last year due to worries about their ads being placed next to objectionable content, though some have since returned.  

The Center for Countering Digital Hate has issued multiple reports about hate speech on X in the months since Musk’s takeover, including comments targeted at the LGBTQ+ community. 

Some DTC brands see Instagram as the more brand-safe option. 

“You need to go where your customers are—and I think specifically, since Elon’s reign, our customers are not there,” Kylo Freeman, founder of DTC trans wellness company For Them, which sells chest binders.

But even before Musk took over, social media users had more trust in Instagram than X, according to Insider Intelligence’s “U.S. Digital Trust Benchmark” surveys in 2021 and 2022. 

In the 2022 survey, respondents ranked Instagram as the fifth most trusted social media platform, whereas X came in at number eight out of nine brands. (Pinterest ranked first in 2022 while Facebook finished last both years.)

Shizu Okusa, CEO and founder of DTC herbal wellness brand Apothekary, said that in her experience, consumers are more likely to reach out for customer service requests on Instagram than they are on X due to Instagram being a more “trusted brand.” 

“People just don't want to share their phone numbers or their email, or even an order number, versus on Instagram,” Okusa said of X. “There's a trust issue, I think, on Twitter.”

Talking shop

Many of the DTC brands that have seen success on Threads thus far say they’ve been using it as its name intended: to create conversation “threads” with consumers.

Threads is “a little bit more about awareness for us, and just connecting directly with our audience and getting to know them a little bit more and engaging in a pretty direct conversation with them,” Sara Crane, content strategist at Olipop, said in an interview.

The hope, according to Crane, is that having a conversation with Olipop on Threads and hearing its brand voice will encourage people to try a single can in-store. If they find a flavor they love, they can then order a 12-pack on the Olipop website, according to Crane. 

“It’s not as much of a visual relationship,” said Yellin, the influencer coordinator at Ollipop, “but it’s about building out direct lines of communication that help strengthen the bond between the consumer and the brand.”

Of course, those conversations could theoretically happen on Twitter. But because of Threads's Instagram follower integration, many Threads users likely already follow the brands they follow on Threads on Instagram, making them familiar with the visual branding that has historically helped DTC brands stand out from their retail predecessors.

“The branding on our cans is so visually rich, that it definitely does help when you can see the actual product,” said Crane.

Some DTC teams on Threads, including the Olipop team, have noticed more and more visuals popping up on the text-based platform itself. For Them’s founder Freeman, for instance, said that while the brand has been testing out different strategies on Threads, “one that’s been working really well is adding a picture or a visual.” 

Looking ahead

Other DTC brands are particularly excited about the possibility of Threads rolling out a paid advertising component—even those that didn’t do much paid advertising on Twitter. 

Threads has been working to integrate paid promotions, Okusa said. 

Okusa said Apothekary will have a budget to test paid advertising on Threads. “We'd love to test it out and diversify across channels,” she said, noting that typically Apothekary starts budgets at around $10,000 per month. “And then if it works, we scale that up from there.”