Meta, the parent company of Threads, is heavily engaged in alluring users’ to its new Twitter rival after the application lost several of its daily users over the past weeks.
Threads saw a buzzy launch, crossing 100 million sign-ups within the first five days of its release, making it the fastest-growing social media platform. Meta’s new app surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which hit the market with a bang in November 2022, to become the forerunner of the AI frenzy era in February.
As Thread failed to hold the initial users of the app, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, told the employees to focus on retention, Reuters reported.
What kind of weaknesses did the app have and why did they leave?
— Iryna (@Iryna_qqbb) July 28, 2023
The user retention of the text-based app, was above the expectations of executives; however, it was “not perfect,” said Zuckerberg in a meeting held at an internal company town hall.
“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” said Zuckerberg.
A normal drop-off?
Despite the massive decline in users, Zuckerberg says the drop-off was ‘normal’ but believes that retention would improve with the gradual addition of more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality.
Meta is planning to add more “retention-driving hooks” to magnetize users to return to the app, like “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
The executives’ comments came after the company’s impressive moment of wowing investors with a glowing revenue growth forecast.
It was a promising sign of a potential comeback for Meta, which had been under intense skepticism due to its overambitious spending on the metaverse last year, which coincided with a significant decline in ad sales.
During a call with employees, CEO Zuckerberg expressed his belief that the company’s progress in developing augmented and virtual reality technology to power the metaverse was “on track,” although not significantly ahead of schedule.
Race in Mind with Apple, Google
Zuckerberg further emphasised the need for the company to initiate investment in augmented and virtual reality technologies to stay in the race with rivals like Apple, Google, and Microsoft.
“That way, we have all the tools ready for when this is ready for prime time,” said Zuckerberg, indicating the possible mass adoption of metaverse technologies would take place in the 2030s.
Zuckerberg and Cox highlighted the company’s recent release of an artificial intelligence model called Llama 2. They made it freely available for commercial use to any developer whose services had fewer than 700 million users.
The model has received over 150,000 download requests in the week since its release, according to Cox.
Zuckerberg is “not sure if it’s going to come together” about the proposed “cage match” against Elon Musk.
Reels closing the gap with TikTok
Meta’s video-sharing platform, which started as a rival to ubiquitous TikTok in 2020, is closing the revenue app.
Meta unveiled compelling statistics on Wednesday, July 26, indicating rapid growth in Reels videos among users and advertisers, positioning the feature as a strong contender against TikTok.
“We can show Reels that we think you’re interested in based on our discovery engines,” said Justin Osofsky, Meta’s head of online sales, operations and partnerships.
Now topping 200 billion per day, the number of Reels video plays on Facebook and Instagram has surged from 140 billion last fall.
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