“Threads” Piques Publisher Interest

Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins and Bloomsbury are among the early publisher adopters of the new social media platform Threads. 

Sara Lloyd, Pan Macmillan’s communications director, told The Bookseller: “We have set up accounts on Threads and will be watching developments, audience growth and response carefully as we develop our content strategy to reach readers on this new platform.”

Threads is owned by Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.  It allows users to post messages of 500 characters in length and videos of up to 5 minutes.

Tram-Anh Doan, head of social media for Bloomsbury, said: “We knew, as many people did, that any app powered by Meta was one to take seriously. Our social media team were poised on Thursday morning to activate accounts, but even then, we were astonished by the speed at which Threads took off, with over 17,000 people following Bloomsbury in the first 24 hours.

“We were immediately struck by the cleverness of its integration with Instagram, enabling you to follow all your Instagram contacts at the click of a button, as well as the high engagement levels with the app on the very first day.

“As a company, we have always tried to experiment with new apps and are aware that it is early days to be making firm strategic plans around such a new app. Our core social channels are currently Instagram, Twitter, Facebook and TikTok – adding in another social network to the mix presents many immediate challenges that we will need to understand and overcome.

“We do firmly believe that Twitter isn’t over by any means – there will always be a market for people who don’t want a Meta-owned app, who don’t want to connect an Instagram account to a Threads account. And Twitter’s existing user base is still so enormous that it can’t be wiped off the map without putting up a fight.”