🧃 Who Even Wanted TikTok Text or Threads?!

⏰ 1-SECOND SUMMARY

• Twitter rebranded as the letter X

• Threads rolled out a chronological Following feed and TikTok launched text posts… what does it all mean?

• Where are celebrities spending their time: Instagram, Threads or Twitter?

• This YouTuber got a Nike sponsorship before he even posted his first video — his advice is below 🔽

💻 ROADMAP

📲 YouTube Updates

YouTube Studio settings are getting an update that will allow creators to more easily edit their channel banner and navigate between accounts through settings. The layout is also being reorganized into more intuitive categories.

📲 Twitter Updates

Over the weekend, Elon Musk suddenly announced Twitter would be renamed as X. Surprised? So were employees, partners, advertisers, app users, and the rest of the world.

• No one but Musk and his CEO seemed to have any idea what was happening. It took over 24 hours after Musk’s pronouncement for branding on the app to catch up. And it’s still not consistent.

• There was no plan for replacing Twitter’s real life signage. A crew removed half the sign on its San Francisco headquarters but paused when the police showed up and put a stop to it.

• No one secured the X handle. On Tuesday, it was taken away from the person who had used it for the past 16 years. Reminder: you don’t own your social media handles, tech lawyer Franklin Graves tweeted.

• No one looked into securing rights to X which means Meta, Microsoft and hundreds of other companies already have intellectual property rights to the same letter. "There's a 100% chance that Twitter is going to get sued over this by somebody," trademark attorney Josh Gerben told Reuters.

• No one got a heads up about the switcheroo, despite how it impacts things like web design, product packaging and other partners. CBS’s Superfan show host Keltie Knight pointed out the show plans to use Twitter as its voting platform — something they won’t be able to update in time for launch.

Apparently no one told Musk the move-fast-and-break-things era is over. His ambition to be the everything app — “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking” – is interesting but only works if people are still logging on. That won’t happen if X becomes the most hated place on the internet.

📲 Meta Updates

Meta’s text-based app Threads rolled out several updates this week, including new feed options:

• For you is a view of your Threads feed that includes a mix of posts from profiles you’ve chosen to follow and recommended accounts

• The Following feed will only show posts from people you follow in chronological order

• Threads now includes post translations

• There are new ways to filter notifications in the Activity tab

• A prominent follow button now shows up alongside new follower notifications

Instagram subscriptions are coming to eligible creators in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Spain, and the United Kingdom over the next few weeks.

📲 TikTok Updates

TikTok chose this week to announce a new option to share text posts on Feed and Stories. Text posts can be accessed through the Camera page, where users can choose from three options: photo, video, and text. Text posts can also be customized with sounds, stickers, location tagging, background colors, tags and hashtags.

Great. What does all the buzz about Threads, TikTok text and even Twitter’s rebrand all mean?!

With the launch of Threads and now TikTok text posts, the copycat conundrum is hard to miss, reports Axios’ Sara Fischer. Most of the major social media platforms now look the same, distinguished only by their philosophies, values and use cases.

But is there even a good reason for parent companies Meta and ByteDance to roll out text-based alternatives with Threads and TikTok?

Some of the possible explanations being discussed online include:

• This is an opportunity for Instagram to reset the social graph. Users get to purge their Instagram following and decide who comes with them to Threads

• There’s the “Twitter killer” theory, whereby Meta and ByteDance are trying to capitalize on the current implosion and user defection we’re seeing at the company formerly known as Twitter. This could be the digital version of the cage-match between Mark Zuckerberg and Musk that will probably never happen

• It’s been suggested that Meta could be collecting data to train their own AI tool, LLaMa. And there’s no reason to doubt ByteDance wouldn’t be interested in doing the same

• This rounds out the Meta and ByteDance universes. Now, users have every possible content combination from text and video to live and stories at their fingertips

• This lowers the barrier to entry on these platforms. Even unproduced videos require a certain amount of atmospheric energy. You need decent lighting, sound and visuals to shoot video. But text doesn’t take more than a fourth grade reading level to create and consume content

It might very well be a combination of all of the above. Or it’s possible Threads and TikTok are rolling out text-based posts for a reason that has yet to be revealed.

Either way, should you lean in on text?

Yes… Maybe? Not too much. Audiences haven’t exactly been clamoring for more text options. Instead, this feels very much like a platform-derived push. Sort of like when Instagram tried to force the pivot to Reels. And look how that went.

There’s also no compelling evidence that people who are leaving Twitter are making their way to Threads or TikTok any more than Mastodon, Post, Bluesky, Spill or any other app trying to fill the void. Threads engagement has actually dropped 70% since launch.

The best strategy at the moment is to repurpose your content cross platform. It’s been frowned upon in the past but until the dust clears, X or Twitter or whatever it’s called stabilizes and the purpose of Threads or text on TikTok becomes clear, there isn’t really a strategic value to producing exclusive content for each platform.

If you’re going to spend your mental energy on anything…

Think about how you connect with people, especially Gen Z and Alpha, who are moving into smaller, private spaces.

Even Instagram head Adam Mosseri has said the company sees close connections moving into DMs and Stories.

And there’s been a trend of creators looking to migrate their audiences off social and into communities that aren’t controlled by algorithms: Discord servers, email lists, WhatsApp, Geneva or Telegram Groups, etc.

For brands and social media managers, that’s thinking about accessing those spaces. How do you show up in somebody’s DMs or Discord server if you’re not invited? It might be through new ad solutions (hello, Snapchat), creator product seeding or unconventional participation in spaces like gaming (remember when the brands all joined Animal Crossing?)

But the fact is, Gen Alpha is not embracing traditional social media platforms — so how will you find and connect with them?

Hint: it’s probably not through another feed-focused app.

What Happened When 15 of Twitter’s Top Celebrities Joined Threads

The New York Times compiled a list of 15 of some of the most-followed celebrities and high-profile figures on Twitter who joined Threads, including Katy Perry, Ellen DeGeneres, Bill Gates, Britney Spears, Shakira and Oprah Winfrey. Then they compared their activity on Twitter with their activity on Threads and Instagram every day between July 5 and July 25.

Instagram was the most popular with more than half of the celebrities the Times followed over the past three weeks, based on the number of days they were active on each platform (not counting Stories).