Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg dealt a blow to Elon Musk on Wednesday night because the tech billionaire rivalry kicked off with the launch of Instagram’s highly anticipated Threads platform, a Twitter clone.
Analysts said investors were drooling over the concept Threads’ ties to Instagram could give it a built-in user base and an ad engine that would siphon ad dollars from Twitter as its recent CEO tries to revitalize the struggling microblogging company.
While Threads is launched as a standalone application, screenshots posted on the Apple App Store showed that users will give you the option to log in with their Instagram credentials and follow the identical accounts, making it a simple addition to existing habits for Instagram’s over 2 billion monthly energetic users.
“Investors can not help but be excited on the prospect that Meta really does have ‘Twitter-Killer’ able to go live to tell the tale the app store,” said Danni Hewson, head of monetary evaluation at investment platform firm AJ Bell.
Meta shares closed 3% ahead of launch on Wednesday, outpacing gains from rival tech firms because the broader market began to say no.
![Mark Zuckerberg](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000012044438-1.jpg?w=1024)
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Threads’ arrival comes after Zuckerberg and Musk have been trading spikes for months and even threatened to fight one another in an actual mixed martial arts cage match in Las Vegas.
The time is true for Meta to strike a blow as Musk’s months of chaotic decision making has rocked Twitter, said Matt Navarra, a social media consultant who has worked with Meta, Google and Pinterest.
Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion last October, but its value has since plummeted because it faced an exodus of advertisers amid deep staff cutbacks and a content moderation controversy.
![Elon Musk](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013331540.jpg?w=1024)
While Meta will likely deal with growing users first before enabling ads on Threads, “there might be big brands who will happily (invest) a major amount of ad spending on the platform” to capitalize on the early hype, Navarra said.
“It can be tastier and safer for the brand than what is obtainable on Twitter,” he said.
To construct Threads, Meta is popping to social media influencers to draw them to the brand new app and encourage them to post no less than twice a day, said Ryan Detert, CEO of influencer marketing firm Influential.
![Twitter and threads logo](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/07/NYPICHPDPICT000013628438.jpg?w=1024)
The app also advantages from the failure of other potential Twitter competitors to fail to capitalize on the service’s missteps. While many recent and growing competitors corresponding to Mastodon, Post and T2 have tried to lure Twitter users away, to this point all of them remain relatively small.
Bluesky, a recent service backed by Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, launched an invite-only beta in February and immediately caused a buzz on Twitter with users clamoring for access codes. Its website says it has 50,000 users. Dorsey also supported one other platform called Nostr.
However the story works against Meta. It has suffered many failures up to now launching standalone mimic apps, most notably the Lasso app, which goals to compete with rival TikTok briefly videos.
Later, the corporate incorporated a tool for brief videos directly on Instagram, and recently shut down its department that was tasked with designing experimental apps as a part of a cost-cutting effort.
One other potential hit with Threads is that Twitter’s news-centric culture differs from that of Instagram, a more visual platform, said Jasmine Enberg, principal analyst at Insider Intelligence.
“Twitter’s major use cases proceed to maintain up with world news and events,” said Enberg. “I find it hard to assume that essentially the most die-hard, loyal Twitter users who come to Twitter for one of these culture will leave and immediately go to Threads.”
Nevertheless, she said Meta only needed to persuade 1 / 4 of Instagram users to affix Threads to rival Twitter’s size. “The truth is that Meta doesn’t must convert Twitter power users into Threads users.”