There’s a lot of people wondering online if it will stick around or go the way of Clubhouse.

Here’s my take: Clubhouse was always doomed to become a super niche product that had little to no chance of keeping up the popularity it did during quarantine days. You have to stop what you’re doing to use Clubhouse since it’s audio. You can’t do it passively while on the TV or around other people. 

Threads is different. They did a good job recruiting celebrities, which is one of the key drivers of engagement and adoption on most platforms. They also did it well by making it an easy transition from your Instagram account to Threads.

They’ve brought in over 20 million users in under 24 hours. Engagement so far is reminiscent of early social media, where it was easy to do well organically.

So do you need to join?

Short answer: no.

I’ve long been a believer that you don’t need to be on every platform. One of the first things I often recommend people to do is shut down the accounts they’re only kind of using. You either commit to doing something well or don’t bother. 

You won’t go out of business if you’re not on Threads. I’ve been in the industry for 10+ years, and I’ve heard, “If you’re not doing X, you’ll be out of the business in five years” countless times, and it’s never been true.

There are two main reasons to join Threads from a business perspective:

1. You’re seeing your clients and potential clients are active on Threads. At the end of the day, go where they are. If they’re joining and engaging, that means you can deepen your relationship and have meaningful conversations.
2. Networking. Early Twitter was the best for networking with industry professionals, local media and local politicians. A lot of good relationships were built that led to real results. It’s an open forum for everyone, and you can make connections that you otherwise may not have been able to.

I’d pick one or the other as the focus for your account, and for most, I think it’s the networking side that will more likely be the value focus for most.

It’s a great place right now to test out new content and see what sticks. It’s likely the playbook you’d use to do Twitter well will work on Threads, but that remains to be seen. There’s going to be a lot of figuring things out over the next little while.

I’ll give you the same advice I give for Twitter; if you want to do it well, spend 90 per cent of your efforts engaging with others and their accounts and 10 per cent posting to your own. That will do more for you than anything else.

If you do join Threads, come say hello; I’m giving it a shot.