The Emergence of Threads: The Birth of a New Social Network

TL;DR

This study explores the emergence of Threads, a new social media platform from Meta, analyzing user behavior, content preferences, and engagement patterns in comparison to Instagram, revealing distinct topical interests and posting habits.

Contribution

It provides an initial comparative analysis of user behavior and content trends between Threads and Instagram, highlighting platform-specific engagement and topic preferences.

Findings

Threads engages more with political and AI topics.

User activity patterns are similar on weekends across both platforms.

Users tend to post about topics that receive more likes.

Abstract

Threads, a new microblogging platform from Meta, was launched in July 2023. In contrast to prior new platforms, Threads was borne out of an existing parent platform, Instagram, for which all users must already possess an account. This offers a unique opportunity to study platform evolution, to understand how one existing platform can support the "birth" of another. With this in mind, this paper provides an initial exploration of Threads, contrasting it with its parent, Instagram. We compare user behaviour within and across the two social media platforms, focusing on posting frequency, content preferences, and engagement patterns. Utilising a temporal analysis framework, we identify consistent daily posting trends on the parent platform and uncover contrasting behaviours when comparing intra-platform and cross-platform activities. Our findings reveal that Threads engages more with political and AI-related topics, compared to Instagram which focuses more on lifestyle and fashion topics. Our analysis also shows that user activities align more closely on weekends across both platforms. Engagement analysis suggests that users prefer to post about topics that garner more likes and that topic consistency is maintained when users transition from Instagram to Threads. Our research provides insights into user behaviour and offers a basis for future studies on Threads.