Meta’s strategy for quickly gaining and retaining millions of users 

Part 1 – User On-boarding Strategy

Within an hour of launch, Threads had one million users 

The platform reached 10 million users in seven hours 

30 million users in a day

100 million users in 5 days and

150 million users in 2 weeks 

Threads is now the fastest app to reach its first million users. The primary reason behind this exceptional feat is its user-onboarding strategy. 

In the early days of the Internet, the signup process of a platform would vary from a single step to multiple steps. 

In most cases, you have to fill out long forms with your information again and again for every platform, especially the social media platforms you sign up for. 

Remember facebook?

It would ask for your name, DOB, city, school or workplace, relatives, interests, profile photo, cover photo uploads, and many more. After that extensive form-filling and sign-up process, you have to go on the platform and start making friends, build your interests and preferences, and of course create some content to share with your friends and audiences. 

It’s fun if you have to do it once, but it seems tedious, time-consuming, and tiresome if you have to do it again and again on every platform. 

That problem was solved when tech giants started allowing users to sign up on other platforms using their accounts, i.e. Google and Facebook accounts. 

This was an easier signup process as all your basic information was imported from Google or Facebook. However, you still have to make platform-specific changes for general and private information. Next, you have to build up your preferences, interests, audience, and content from the ground up. 

But everything changed with the advent of Threads from Meta. The user onboarding strategy Meta used in their new platform is not only revolutionary, but it also hints towards the future of social media. 

Threads allows the user to sign up using an Instagram account. Here, along with your basic information, your entire social graph from Instagram is shared with the new platform. This includes all your interests, preferences, number of followers as well as the number of accounts you follow. 

This means that your Threads account will have the same amount of followers you have on Instagram if all of them have created a Threads account. You will be following all your favorite accounts as soon as they start with Threads. You are also able to share your content across the platforms. 

Before, may it be any platform, users were only able to share content across different platforms using some extensions or plugins. But now, Threads has leveled up the game and started sharing the social graph of the user across the platform. 

You can also see a unique collaboration between Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, and now Threads. This is happening because all of these apps are under the umbrella of Meta. 

Connecting various platforms where the social graph is shared across all platforms just like the content is shared nowadays. Users already love this because they not only get to quickly sign up and get started with a new social media platform, they get a headstart on that. 

Once others start seeing the potential of this user onboarding strategy, more platforms are going to opt for this.  So, it wouldn’t be a surprise if more and more social media platforms start connecting in unprecedented manners and sharing more data that is helpful to the users. 

But that poses a critical question, how much of your data will be used or shared to provide such conveniences? 

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Part 2 – User retaining strategy

You might have read the story of the zoo owner. 

A person opens the zoo and puts a ticket price at $100. Nobody brought the ticket. He went back down to 80 then 50 and gradually to 10 dollars and still no one brought the entry ticket. 

After that, the zoo owner made a bold decision to open up the zoo for free entry. As a result, the zoo quickly gets crowded. 

That’s when the owner locked the gates from the outside and announced that whoever wanted an exit from the zoo had to pay $500. 

This story is usually told to teach a lesson: to not fall for freebies otherwise, you might have to face consequences. There is also a general understanding that when you accept a gift from someone you become obliged to them. 

With the aesthetics of Instagram and the capabilities of Twitter, Threads was expected to create groundbreaking revolutions in the social media arena. And when it started shattering the records quickly after its launch, many hailed it as the Twitter killer. 

Unfortunately, people weren’t looking for a copied version of Twitter which was enhanced by Instagram aesthetics. Hence, the number of active users quickly plummeted to 5 to 8 million or 10 million daily users within a few days. 

Seeing the phenomenal rise of the platform you can say that’s a huge setback but kudos to Meta, they were aware of their weaknesses. The launch of the platform was rushed only because they wanted to take advantage of the uncertainties around their main competitor.  

They might knew that despite leveraging the uncertainties and the signup perks to quickly bring in a lot of people, their platform wasn’t ready enough to retain that large user base. So they decided to lock in the users until the platform is ready to serve them well up to their expectations. 

Linking Instagram with Threads to create an account on the new platform and bring in all the data was a masterstroke. But what goes beyond that is they did another masterstroke by using a strategy similar to that of the zoo owner. 

People were lured to Threads using Instagram but once they were on the platform the gates were locked from the outside. Of course, an exit was provided but the users had to pay a heavy penalty, i.e. losing their Instagram account. 

The rule that Meta put in to lock in the Threads users who wanted to leave the platform for good warned: if you delete your Threads account then your Instagram account would be deleted too. 

Instagram has the largest social media user base. And in terms of loyalty and influence, it’s right next to Twitter. So it is highly unlikely that most people will willingly leave their favorite image-based social media platform. 

Of course, the active users dwindled but the number of accounts wouldn’t be dropping significantly because Meta used a brilliant strategy to tie their loyal Instagram with Threads. 

So, even though inactive, Threads has a large user base which they can tap into any time they want. Now, they can take their time to make necessary changes to the Threads and make it alive again and put it in real competition with the X.