Meta’s new social media platform, Threads launched earlier this month and already has over 100 million users. The Twitter rival’s design appears to be focused towards conversation between users, with the limited explore function only returning other users that include or are closely related to the word you typed in.
When the app first launched earlier this month, we wrote a piece containing 3 reasons why board game publishers should embrace the platform. Today we have more helpful insights for publishers looking to join the conversation.
Platform - Mobile Only
At time of writing, Threads is a mobile-only platform. From Meta’s perspective, this makes a lot of sense, as people take their phones everywhere, meaning the user base for the app is more likely to use it throughout their day. This also means that tabletop game publishers have even more opportunities to connect with their audience throughout the day. Whilst the app doesn’t currently feature an analytics page – more on this soon – at this stage it is absolutely worth manually checking when your posts get the most engagement, irrespective of the types of post you’re sharing with your audience (more on types of post later too!). You can use this information to post onto the platform when your audience is more likely to see it.
Video - Up to 5 minutes Long
Despite the prevalence of shortform video on TikTok, YouTube, and even Instagram Reels, Meta have played it safe and given Threads users access to video up to five minutes in length. This is the perfecy length for you to show off the mechanics and components for a game. Bear in mind that whilst videos can be up to 5 minutes long, hooking your audience within the first few seconds is essential to retain them for the rest of the video.
We also recommend creating a few different versions of a video, with the content optimised for the platform you’ll be posting on based on the following best practices:
TikTok: <10 seconds
Instagram Reels: 15-30 seconds
Instagram Stories: 15 seconds or less
Facebook: 30-90 seconds
Twitter: 20-45 seconds
YouTube: 5-15 minutes
LinkedIn: 30 seconds to 5 minutes
Character Limit
As with video content mentioned above, Meta has toed the line on the character limit for posts on Threads too. You’re limited to 500 characters per post, which is more than the 280 Twitter was limited to for a long time, but a lot less than Twitter’s current character limit, which is in the thousands.
This means you’ll have some room to play with when writing posts, but will still have to keep it brief. It also means you’ll be able to get stuck into replying to people that have commented on your posts that much quicker too, rather than spending your time on the platform writing your initial post.
Hashtags
Surprisingly, hashtags don’t appear to feature on Threads. Whilst you can include them in your posts, the explore function within the app doesn’t return anything other than user accounts at the time of writing. Relatedly, we recommend using the full name of your business or a variation thereof so that it appears in the discover function. For example, our account is all.about.games.consulting, the same as our Instagram account.
Optimising your account name is essential for discoverability online in general, but especially on Threads.
Notifications
Threads and Instagram notifications appear in their respective apps – you won’t get notified of things related to your Thread account on IG and vice versa, so be sure to check in regularly on each platform to keep up to speed with the interactions you’re having with your audience on each platform. Luckily, Meta have made switching between Threads and Instagram easily done by including buttons for each account on the other platform.
Analytics
-As we mentioned earlier, there are no analytics for you to dig into in order to figure out what your audience is engaging with the most. The manual approach we mentioned earlier is the best bet for tracking metrics like comments, likes, follower count, etc. A spreadsheet could work for tracking this until Meta implements some form of analytics natively in the app.
Based on Meta’s track record for including metrics as part of their platforms, they know businesses will be eagerly awaiting this feature, so it is highly likely this will be released in the near future!
Types of Posts
- Though new, Threads follows one of the oldest rules in the social media book: posts with a visual element to them, be it a GIF, Photo(s) or video will perform better. We recommend leaning towards video too; it’s where Meta’s competition lies - I.e. TikTok and YouTube - and so their algorithm will naturally favour this type of content in a post, despite the app leaning more towards text than other popular apps.
You can include up to ten photos and/or videos per post and we recommend including multiple if you’re going to share imagery. It is highly likely that the action a user takes of swiping through the selection of images and video you shared will count as engagement on your post, therefore giving your post a boost in the algorithm which will then deliver it to more users.
- You can experiment with sharing posts from other people that have achieved a lot of engagement, where appropriate. For example, if you’re a publisher that works closely with other publishers that localise your games in a different country and you see they have created a very engaging post, share that with a friendly message and tag their page. If you happen to be looking for partners to localise your board games, our localisation sales service might be of interest to you!
- Like most other social media platforms, posts that ask questions perform well – we recommend doing a little research and seeing what kind of questions get a lot of responses within the board gaming niche on the platform. You could even combine this tip with one of those above by reposting a thread that asks a compelling question, giving your answer and posing the same question to your audience.
Those are all the tips we have for you today!
Have you been using Threads? What has your experience using it been like so far? Do you have any tips you can share that we missed above? Let us know in the comments!