Meta's Twitter competitor Threads blasts to 70 million registrations one day after takeoff

July 10, 2023: Meta’s new Twitter competitor, Threads, has grown in its first full day since its public debut Wednesday night, fueled by Instagram’s massive userbase. The text-based social media platform already has 70 million signups, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on Friday.

As of Thursday afternoon, The Verge reported that users had already posted more than 95 million posts and 190 million likes, based on internal company data it had viewed.

The booming growth is helped by Threads being tied to an existing social network, Meta’s Instagram. Users can sign up with their existing handles on Instagram and retain some of their following as others sign up for the app.

“Meta only needs 1 in 4 Instagram users to use Threads monthly for it to be as big as Twitter,” Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence, said in a statement. Twitter reported nearly 238 million monetizable daily active users in its last quarterly earnings report as a public company last summer.

The app still has room to grow, having yet to launch in Europe, where Instagram’s chief said there is still some regulatory complexity to navigate.

Twitter owner Elon Musk appears to have already shown some concern about Threads, as his longtime lawyer Alex Spiro wrote a letter to Meta accusing the company of “unlawful misappropriation” of trade secrets.

“No one on the Threads engineering team is a former Twitter employee,” Meta’s communications director, Andy Stone, wrote on Threads in response to the letter. “That’s just not a thing.”

Still, more than growth alone will be needed to make Threads an alternative to Twitter that withstands the test of time. The app must also show that it can keep users engaged and returning.

While Twitter is known for being heavily used by journalists, politicians, and academics and is where news often breaks, Meta’s Threads could have a much broader audience and focus due to its tie-in to Instagram, which has different use cases as a visual-based platform. Plus, Meta has taken steps to de-emphasize political content on Facebook, a policy which, if carried over to Threads, would set it apart from Twitter.