Twitter VS Instagram Threads: Here’s the Difference in Performance

Threads has been around for more than a week and the last reported numbers show there are over 100 million users on Threads.

Not too shabby for a new social network.

People thought it was impressive how ChatGPT crossed 1 million users in five days… but Threads by Instagram blew everyone out of the water, and even Facebook didn’t expect it to do this well early on.

Now one thing that is certain is that Threads is going after Twitter directly. But the question is, at least from a marketing standpoint, what’s going to get you more views and engagement?

Twitter vs Threads By Instagram

When Threads first came around we notice a lot of users doing one thing…

They were taking the content they were already producing for other social networks, especially Twitter, and repurposing it for Threads.

There is nothing new with this, as content repurposing is how many marketers and companies take an omnichannel approach with less effort.

So we started to dig in and track the accounts posting similar content on Threads and Twitter.

We couldn’t find enough of them so we also enlisted the help of the marketing community to figure out the difference in engagement between the two platforms.

All in all, we tracked 308 accounts for this study. And the results were interesting…

Threads Has More Engagement

We expected Threads to have more engagement because, with any new social network, your goal is to have everyone see everything which helps the network grow faster.

Then, of course, you monetize and suppress engagement to increase ad revenue.

But the engagement is drastically better on Threads. Just look at the chart below.

From the users we tracked, many of them marketers, Threads was generating 31.4 likes (hearts) per post versus 4.9 on Twitter.

When you look at comments, Threads was at 4.3 versus Twitter at 0.4 per post.

Now you may be thinking: If people have more followers on Threads, it would skew the results. The same could be said if you had more Twitter followers. So we looked at engagement per follower.

Likes (hearts) per follower on Threads was 0.41% versus Twitter at 0.015%. And when it came to comments, it was 0.056% on Threads versus 0.001% on Twitter.

So, Does This Mean You Get More Views and Reach on Instagram Threads?

More engagement typically means a community that is more likely to evangelize your company or your brand. And follow you and be loyal…

But engagement doesn’t always mean more views.

With Twitter, you can see your reach and they showcase it, but with Threads, they don’t. So it’s too hard to tell.

Over time, I bet they will release this data though.

Now here is what we think will happen…

1. Engagement on Threads will decrease when you look at it as a ratio of followers to likes. It’s a hot social network, but like any platform, you’ll naturally lose some people over time as many users will stop logging in as frequently.
2. Reach will eventually be suppressed. The moment Meta starts monetizing Threads is the moment you’ll see your reach slowly start to drop. The question is just when it will happen.
3. Threads will become more popular, and your reach will increase at least in the next six months. Threads will open up to more countries which means more signups which will cause the reach of your posts to go up.

Conclusion

Whether Instagram Threads or Twitter has more engagement, it doesn’t really matter.

You can post similar types of content on both platforms, so you might as well do so.

All that will happen is more people will see your content. That’s a winning situation for marketers and companies.

Platforms can co-exist… just like how brands use Instagram and Snapchat. Or TikTok and Instagram.

And you’ll see similar pieces of content on most platforms.

Just look at this stat: The average user is on 6.6 social platforms. So the real question is, are you on Threads? Or do you plan to be?