The holidays are just over 20 weeks away, which means that brands should be putting their holiday campaign plans together now, well in advance of peak shopping season.
Marketers also need to think about where they want to focus their efforts and where their audience is engaging. New platforms and evolving user behaviors may offer new ways to connect.
Threads is one key opportunity that might get overlooked. Meta’s answer to Twitter has become a significant force since it launched three years ago. The app now has about 500 million monthly active users and is becoming a bigger focus of discussion every day.
As such, it’s worth considering opportunities on Threads for this year and beyond, and looking at how to use the app to build a presence and drive brand awareness through in-app discussions and engagement.
Here are five tips on how to build the foundations of a brand presence on the platform.
1. Examine trends
Meta hasn’t released any trend-tracking tools for Threads yet, but marketers can use the app’s search functions to find top posts by keyword, recent posts and most active users within each niche.
Digging into the most popular content, both in general terms and from top influencers, can offer insight into what the Threads audience is interested in. That can guide strategic brand approaches.
Threads users can also add a question mark to their queries in the app’s search bar, which will show what questions people are asking about a given topic. Meanwhile, searches can also uncover relevant Threads communities that could be worth joining or keeping tabs on.
2. Note what’s working
In analyzing content, marketers should make a list of key influencers, common questions and the most relevant voices in a niche.
Brands should also make note of which formats are resonating with users.
Do video posts gain more traction, and if so what kind? Are polls driving responses? Do still image updates work? Do link posts drive engagement?
Thinking about format can provide more guidance for an organic strategy that aligns with the way Threads users are engaging with related content.
3. Formulate a strategy
Based on this research, marketers can build a strategy that aligns with organic trends on Threads. Brands can also learn more about what people are asking and how they’re asking it.
In the desktop version of Threads, marketers can also set up monitoring columns, which will let them track future discussions related to certain keywords or influencers.
4. Consider influencer partnerships
Tapping into the right influencers can help to boost a brand’s Threads presence. Influencers offer a link to key community discussions and groups.
Communication in Threads is fairly open, so it’s not as reliant on specific content styles as short-form video apps like TikTok. Even so, marketers need to have a means to connect with the right users in order to broaden their brand awareness with target audiences.
5. Analyze and improve
Once a brand has its Threads strategy down and is posting content to the app, it can then track performance within the Threads Insights tab. That tab provides data on followers, views, interactions and top posts.
Marketers can use this to focus on what’s working and cull what’s not, in order to build on the right objectives for brand goals.
The key, as always, is driving sales. Brands should be careful to focus on metrics that relate to growing their presence with the right audiences, as opposed to simply stacking numbers. Tracking direct sales as a result of organic Threads activity isn’t easy, as most of this will be brand awareness work. But by considering which measures lead to sales, such as website visits or product discussions, brands can maintain the right strategic focus.
