Boost Engagement: Say No to Perfecting Posts, Yes to This!

Welcome to Issue #7 of How To Win Thriends!

T H R E A D L I N E S 📌

• Threads News 🗞️

• Tools & Tests 🛠️

• Top 3 Threads of the Week 👍

• My Best Thriends of the Week 🫶🏽

• Tip of the Week: From Me 🪡

• Tip of the Week: From a Threxpert 🧵

• Questions From The Community 🙋🏽

• Thread The Love 💓

• Account Growth 📈

• Suggestion Box 📥

A Fediverse Threads update

TLDR:

• ‘Threads is being built on the ActivityPub protocol, which means that it will be interoperable with other apps/servers like Mastodon over time.’

• Over the past week, the Threads team ‘took a small, but important, step by allowing people in the Fediverse, who don’t use Threads or even have an Instagram account, to follow [@mossseri’s] Threads account as well as a few others. Content is starting to flow from Threads to the Fediverse.’

• There are plans to

  • make ‘replies from people in the Fediverse … show up for people posting from Threads to the Fediverse.’

  • ‘build support for Threads users to follow Fediverse accounts, so that content can flow from the Fediverse back into Threads.’

  • ‘enable creators to leave Threads and take their followers with them to another app/server.’ @mossseri believes ‘that it's important that creators own their relationship with their audience.’

• All of that will take the better part of a year.

Why you should care:

• Last week I highlighted that the interoperability of Threads will ultimately make it easier for us to make more ‘thriends’.

  • I use that word loosely in this context because idk if connecting with someone (through Threads) who doesn’t use Threads makes them a ‘thriend’(?) 🤯

• This week, I wanna reiterate what @mossseri said above: they plan to empower us to leave Threads and take our followers to another app/server.

  • To me, that sounds fucking awesome.

  • One common pitfall of social media is that you don’t ‘own’ the traffic. You’re at the whim of the algorithm. So you might consider it ‘borrowed traffic’.

  • This is why building an email list is so important. It’s traffic you own.

  • HOWEVER, if we’re able to take our thriends to a different app or server, all of a sudden that distinction between borrowed and owned traffic isn’t so clear.

  • All in all, this will hopefully mean we’ll have more control to interact with our thriends off Threads.

Other updates

• Meta generated around 300 different names for what became Threads

• Threads had its first successful posts via the Threads API

• Threads is working on some special effects for the posts containing New Year's greetings 👀 [my fave]

• Threads accounts will have to be public to show in the fediverse.

• Threads became the number 1 downloaded app in the US!

• Users Flock to Threads as X Suffers Largest Outage Since Musk Takeover (’flock’ is an overstatement, but I nonetheless think we’ll continue to see more of this behaviour)

• How Meta built the infrastructure for Threads (with two days’ notice to prepare for launch!)

• Threads may soon let you hide likes AND shares count

• When Mastodon users tap on [@]mentions for Threads profiles, it automagically opens Threads and displays a profile action sheet for the selected profile

• Check out this ‘Ask us anything’ post from the Instagram @creators account — VERY informative!

Tool: Threads Post

What is it?

• Remember Threaditor from HTWT#3?

• Threads Post is similar to that (but with a couple of notable differences).

• It lets you easily draft, format and store all your posts in one place.

What this can do for you

• As already noted, Threads Post is great if you want to draft, format and store posts.

  • By formatting, I mean emboldening and italicising. In case you haven’t already noticed, I’m a big fan of those 😂

  • But I’m yet to embolden or italicise text in my posts.

  • I’m gonna start using Threads Post to do that.

  • If you do too, make sure you click or tap on the copy clipboard icon in the top right corner of the screenshots to copy your formatted text.

    • If you copy the text any other way, the formatting won’t appear when you paste it into Threads.

• There’s one other feature I wanna touch on. And I think this is where Threads Post stands out compared to Threaditor.

• Threads Post also lets you slice images!

  • What does this mean?

    • Threads Post will horizontally slice images with a wide aspect ratio that you upload.

    • I.e. it will turn one panorama into multiple separate images (see the screenshot below 👇)

  • If you decide to use this feature, note that you must save the separate images to your photo library and then upload them into Threads.

    • You can’t tap the copy clipboard and paste the images into your Threads post.

• So that’s the tool for this week!

• A special thanks to Eric (aka @fullstackeric) for building an insanely useful and simple tool 🙏

(Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: Threads Post is completely free!)

Test: How to remove porn bots in 3 steps

• Not strictly a test, but the whole point of this subsection is to report on an experiment and extract useful advice.

  • We’re skipping the experiment part and heading straight to the useful advice 😂

• The Data King of Threads — AKA @datadrivenmd — is back for another appearance on HTWT.

  • (I will get him on as a Threxpert one day!).

• This week, we’re looking at a recent post of his about porn bots and how to limit their visibility in all aspects of your Threads experience.

• The TLDR: if you see a porn bot anywhere on Threads (whether that’s on your feed, one has followed you etc…), do this:

  1. Report the bot as spam

     • NB: when you do this, ‘you shouldn't expect a response that says the post was taken down or that the account was suspended, but you and your followers will see much, much, much less of it...if at all’

  2. Block them

  3. Repeat this for every bot you see for 2-3 weeks

• If you follow those three steps, Jorge says ‘you'll see a night/day difference in terms of what gets automatically hidden by Threads.’

Key Takeaways

Each post is:

• Relatable

  1. Many women can relate to the frustration of feeling unheard and misunderstood.

  2. Lots of people experience that urge to declutter and simplify (especially at the end of the year).

  3. The desire to stay cozy and avoid the cold resonates with lots of people during winter — especially introverts! 🙋🏻‍♂️

  • 👉 Each post taps into a widely relatable experience/emotion.

• Emotionally evocative

  1. “SHE DESERVES COMMUNICATION”

  2. “The feminine urge” — taps into a shared understanding among women)

  3. “Sit… Read… Sleep… Eat snacks… Not leave my house” — imagery of winter activities evokes contentment and escapism.

     (My inner English nerd = unleashed 😎)

  • 👉 Strong emotions typically encourage engagement (likes and replies) and sharing!

• Concise and shareable

  1. Note the use of white space and how each sentence is only one line long.

  2. The one-sentence meme format is digestible and easy to share.

  3. A list format is visually appealing and likely to get someone’s attention when they’re scrolling through Threads.

  • 👉 Each post is concise and easy to understand, which means they’re ideal for the quick-scrolling nature of Threads (and any social media platform for that matter).