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For fashion brands and influencers, new Meta-owned platform Threads offers an immediate opportunity to capture attention that has been elusive on Twitter, thanks to its integration with Instagram audiences. But can fashion succeed on a text-based platform?
Fashion has not historically thrived on text-based social media, where the same type of controversial, fast-moving wit that racks up retweets also ruffles feathers. Instead, brands have found Instagram’s emphasis on images and videos, where they can delete or restrict comments, safer. Threads’s close proximity to Instagram could be the perfect pairing for fashion brands to explore a Twitter alternative that appeals to an existing, interested fanbase.
Early adopters tout a positive, friendly atmosphere. This is something that Instagram has specifically curated. “It is a much more laidback version of Twitter. If Twitter is the city office, then Threads is the beach clubhouse and people are far more relaxed and it’s not quite as ferocious,” says social media consultant Matt Navarra. “Maybe that will make it a slightly more palatable platform for fashion brands,” he adds.
So far, compared to the razor-sharp tenor of Twitter, that means that Threads is a bit, well, boring. For fashion, that might be a good thing. Already known for acerbic critics (at best) and trolls (or worse), Twitter has become even more chaotic amid the Elon Musk takeover, including a complete reversal in the meaning of verification. Balenciaga left the platform altogether.
The potential to quickly amass followers and attention on Threads is unmatched by other fledgling social media platforms: Instagram has more than 2 billion monthly active users, which is four times that of Twitter, software and web analytics firm SimilarWeb reports. In about three days, more than 70 million people had already signed up for Threads, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg reported on Friday.
Still, fashion brands have been hesitant, and access is not yet available in the EU. Those on the platform already include Balmain, DVF and Nike. None of the top 10 brands in the spring edition of the Vogue Business Index had created accounts by the end of last week. Influencers including Karlie Kloss and Paris Hilton have accounts, and beauty brands Clinique, Sephora, Nars and Esteé Lauder are active.
Brands aside, it could be a place for fashion critics to thrive, even if Threads is currently lacking the same bite as Twitter. Steff Yotka, the head of digital content at Ssense (and the former global director of social media at Vogue) pointed out that “Threads is a great name for an app to dissect the makings of the fashion industry.” Accounts and personalities who have gained followings for text-based social media fashion critiques seem to still be clearing their throats. The influencer Bryan Grey Yambao, known as Bryanboy, has shared a couple of images that are different from what he shared on his permanent Instagram feed and on Twitter.
Media outlets have been among the first to hop on, even though Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that the app is “not going to do anything to encourage” news. “There are more than enough amazing communities — sports, music, fashion, beauty, entertainment, etc — to make a vibrant platform without needing to get into politics or hard news,” he wrote on Threads.
Threads’s potential
Threads accounts pull in a user’s Instagram username, profile picture and bio. Crucially, it offers the option to automatically follow the same accounts as they follow on Instagram. Once onboarded, the format is like Twitter. People can then share text up to 500 characters (in addition to images and videos up to five minutes), and respond and reshare others’ posts.
The ability to automatically follow all of the accounts one follows on Instagram gives brands a major leg up, as most tend to have a much higher following on Instagram than Twitter. “It’s hard to build an audience, a community, around something such as fashion where text is the default medium,” Navarra says. On Instagram, for example, Balmain has 11.9 million followers compared to 595,000 on Twitter — after 11 years on the platform. On Threads, it had about 300,000 followers in three days.
The success of social apps hinges heavily on convenience, says Zarina Stanford, CMO of user-generated content platform Bazaarvoice, who notes that Twitter’s recent limits on the number of free posts available to users might hinder brands’ marketing targets. “Getting the attention of social media users is more challenging than ever for marketers.”
Just how brands will get attention is still being ironed out. “Everybody’s turning up and trying to read the room, figure out what’s going on, trying to be cool and figure out the vibe and the tone,” Navarra says. “We won’t know what that is fully for a little while.”
Some brands have taken to directly recycling previous Tweets, noted Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz, who specialises in social media and internet culture. This might be short-lived. “While the strategy may be able to be similar because of the similarity of the user interfaces, to be impactful, adjustments will be needed,” Bazaarvoice’s Stanford says. “The user base will not be identical and to be impactful, deploying the same audience strategy will be flawed. Furthermore, many will be using Threads because they’re looking for a similar, but different, experience than Twitter.”
Some might find it a welcome venue for the ongoing meme-ifciation of marketing. Formalwear company The Black Tux has a characteristically polished persona on Instagram (127,000 followers), and has been testing candid humour on Twitter (less than 5,000 followers). On Threads, where it already has more than 7,200 followers, it’s kicking that up a notch. Co-founder and CEO Andrew Blackmon is asking people to troll his groomsmen; the brand is also calling out rival Men’s Wearhouse for not yet being on Threads.
“Threads feels like the comment section of TikTok in the best way,” says The Black Tux CMO Matt Sutton, who says that growth on Threads has taken off faster than any other platform before it. The brand has stayed a bit “buttoned up” on Twitter due to frequent customer service inquiries, and used Instagram to “set the mood” of the brand, he says, but Threads is a place to have a little fun. “We’re testing meme content we wouldn’t share on Instagram and leaning into building community with conversation-starters and funny direct talk,” he says, plus replying to viral conversations. “Threads offers an opportunity for fashion brands to succeed. With the Instagram association, where fashion brands, like us, already have a strong, dedicated audience, we believe this can give us a leg up.”
In the past year, fashion has found one compelling use for Twitter: the Web3 community, which uses Twitter as a core platform for sharing information and reactions to NFT projects and communities. Indeed, Dior has been by far the most active brand on Twitter in the past week, compared to the other four brands that topped the Vogue Business Index this spring (Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Saint Laurent and Chanel). That’s partly because this past week, Dior has introduced its first-ever Web3 project in the form of special B33 sneakers that come with NFC chips and blockchain-based authentication. And in June, Louis Vuitton upped the ante on Twitter, where it announced its big Web3 project, including several Twitter threads by influential leaders in Web3. In contrast, Louis Vuitton didn’t post about the project on its permanent Instagram feed.
It’s too soon to know if the Web3 community will crossover to Threads; notably, Instagram shut down its programme to incorporate NFTs on the platform in March.
There’s also the customer service route. Perhaps Threads, through integrations with other Meta messaging tools, might offer a convenient venue for customer requests in the way that Twitter has become a last resort of frustrated customers hoping to catch the attention of brands. Twitter’s overhaul of its verification system has made it more difficult for customers to know what accounts belong to brands, meaning there’s an open opportunity for Threads to be the place for updates, complaints and requests. Already, Meta has created a number of tools specifically for messaging with businesses, including the acquisition of customer service tech provider Kustomer last February. But again, an administrative hub is not exactly the most exciting use case for a social media platform.
Fashion week will likely be the true test of how the fashion community uses Threads. When Instagram Stories launched in August 2016, it meant that people on the go could more easily share ephemeral fashion show content on one platform instead of toggling between Snapchat, Instagram and photo editing apps. Threads, however, is not yet integrated in that way and is an entirely separate app. That’s not to say that in the future, people won’t be able to simultaneously post to Threads and Instagram at the same time, the way they currently can elect to post the same content to Instagram and Facebook at the same time. Meta has said that it is working toward making Threads compatible with other competing networks, such as Mastadon and Wordpress, “that we believe can shape the future of the internet”, according to a blog post.
Will Threads be any different in shaping the future of fashion? “The dust needs to settle, and the hype cycle needs to calm down a bit,” Navarra says. We’ll see how boring it is in September.
Additional reporting by Rae Nguyen
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