I watched it happen in real time. Wednesday night, Meta drops Threads, and by Thursday morning my entire LinkedIn feed was brand strategists breathlessly posting their "first Threads take" like they'd just discovered fire. Wendy's was there. Netflix was there. Your dentist was probably there.
Within 48 hours, Threads hit 100 million sign-ups. Within a week, engagement was already cratering. And somewhere in Portland, I was watching my cat Truffles stare at a wall with more sustained attention than most brands were giving their Threads strategy.
Here's what bothers me: not a single brand I saw had a reason to be there beyond "everyone else is." FOMO is not a content strategy. It's not even a good reason to go to a party, let alone invest resources in a new platform.
Here's what bothers me: not a single brand I saw had a reason to be there beyond "everyone else is." FOMO is not a content strategy.
The brands that won the Threads launch weren't the ones who posted first. They were the ones who posted with purpose. Notion used the platform's text-first format to share genuinely useful productivity tips. It fit. Meanwhile, brands built entirely on visual storytelling were cramming square pegs into round, text-only holes.
The strategic question nobody asked: Does this platform serve our audience in a way our current channels don't?
Because if the answer is "no, but it's new and shiny," you've just told your team to split their already-thin attention across yet another channel that may not exist in six months. Remember Clubhouse? Remember when every brand needed a Discord server?
I'm not saying ignore new platforms. I'm saying the rush to be first is almost always less valuable than the patience to be right. Twitter is actively combusting under Elon's management, and yes, there's white space opening up for a text-based social platform. But white space doesn't mean your brand needs to fill it immediately.
The brands that will win on whatever platform eventually replaces Twitter's cultural role are the ones asking: What do we actually want to say? Who are we saying it to? And does this format let us say it better than where we already are?
Three questions. Most brands skipped all of them and went straight to "post the logo and a wave emoji."
My prediction: by August, most brands will have quietly abandoned their Threads presence, and by October, we'll all pretend it never happened. The ones still posting will be the ones who had a reason to be there in the first place.
Platform strategy isn't about presence. It's about purpose. And right now, most brands on Threads have one without the other.