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In the midst of the X upheaval caused by Twitter’s abrupt rebranding, Meta sees an opportunity to leverage a fresh wave of Twitter users who are now seeking alternative platforms. To cater to these potential adopters, Meta introduces several novel features for Threads, aiming to create a more familiar Twitter experience.
The most significant addition is the introduction of a ‘Following’ feed, which complements the existing ‘For You’ stream that displays recommended and followed content. With this enhancement, Threads users can exclusively view content from the profiles they’ve decided to follow within the application. This update brings Threads much closer to the traditional Twitter experience, providing a sense of familiarity for those transitioning from the former platform.
Post by @mosseriView on Threads
As it seems, the ‘Following’ feed was a major feature that users felt was missing from the app at its initial launch, but now it will be displayed chronologically on users’ requests and feedback.
Users have turned off the app due to some off recommendations on the app as they were forced to sift through a stream of strange accounts that they had never heard of. Now that the issue is fixed along with other major updates, looks like Meta is on a mission to beat rivals by taking feedback from the end users.
What was “Threads” biggest the issue?
Threads app was directly linked to Instagram, and it has both pros and cons. The benefit we have all seen and known as it has gained the platform over 100 million users within 5 days as they could directly link to their Instagram account and signup for the new app. The issue was that it used the Instagram graph as a proxy for Threads’ interest.
Therefore, showing users content from the accounts they were already following on Instagram from people they are already following or had shown interest in the app. But for the fact, people use Instagram and Twitter with very different intent or different information. When they were shown the same content without any update that they were expecting they bounced back to Twitter.
Instagram surely has a place in your routine and appetite for entertainment, while when you talk about Twitter it has a different place serving your business or knowledge-sharing appetite. Apparently, Threads stayed in the middle doing nothing new, and was not able to create its place.
And taking the critical feedback from end users, the platform came up with an updated algorithm and new feature update giving users some more control over what’s displayed making it much more Twitter-like, and it is expected that it will likely enhance engagement and interaction within the app as a consequence.
‘Threads’ new biggest update to solve the issues
With new additions on the table, Threads is most likely to bring a better user experience and keep them entertained by providing a traditional Twitter-like space for knowledge-sharing. And with the whole Twitter rebranding saga it may seem beneficial for the app to roll out the updates and capture the market.
Key Threads feature update:
- The ‘Following’ feed is a big addition
- A ‘Following’ feed option to only see the posts from people they follow in chronological order could help the platform enhance the user experience.
- Post translations
- Threads now has post translations which means the posts in the feed will now be automatically translated based on the language that they’re written in, and the language settings of the person viewing it. Users will also be able to translate posts into other languages by tapping the translation button at the bottom right of the post.
- New ways to filter notifications in Activity
- Meta’s also added new sorting options for your ‘Activity’ feed, enabling you to filter the listed actions by follows, quotes, and reposts.
- Follow button to easily follow your followers back
- They have also added a new ‘Follow’ button within your followers list to help you build your feed with new voices.
- A quick way to approve new followers if your account is private
- Meta has added an option to ‘approve all’ follow requests which is another means to build the Threads graph. And they have added a new activity-tracking element to show full listings of the posts that they’ve liked.
These are some handy updates, that may shape the user engagement statistics for Meta’s new app, meanwhile, Twitter is gradually updating and rebranding itself into Elon Musk’s ‘X’ vision. Feels like we can expect another surge in Threads interest, considering over 2 million more members registered, and bringing constant updates will make users feel more at home in the app.
Meta will definitely prefer users to have access to content from a wider range of sources in order to give more exposure to content creators, and also to highlight the best-performing content from across the app, as opposed to people narrowing their focus into their niche groups. Well, looks like they are looking for a more viable option as the Threads algorithm improves, and it better understands what users want from Threads, specifically.
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