There may not be room in the market for both Twitter and Threads. The limits of the growth of social media platforms always come up against each other in the end, reminds the social media expert at the University of Helsinki.
“Global town square”, described Twitter’s CEO at the time Dick Costolo service in June 2013.
In a speech almost exactly ten years ago, Costolo compared Twitter to ancient Greece To the Agorato markets, which serve as arenas for social discussion, among other things.
Ten years later, Twitter seems to be losing its role as a global marketplace. The platform has undergone numerous changes since the billionaire Elon Musk bought the company last fall. Many of them have angered at least some of the platform’s users.
At least the fees for verified accounts and the changes in the platform input have attracted criticism. Last weekend, Twitter began limiting how many tweets each user can view per day.
Twitter took another hit last week when Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp, launched its challenger to Twitter.
Meta’s Threads service is very similar to Twitter, and the company hasn’t tried to hide it. The application has been introduced as a side product of Instagram.
“I think there should be a public chat app with over a billion users. Twitter has had the opportunity to do that, but the company has failed to do so. I hope we succeed,” said Meta’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Competitive however, the role of the world market is tight, and especially among young users, the Chinese-owned video platform Tiktok seems to be among the top contenders.
For example, authorities have used Twitter to reach their audiences quickly. Now, at least in the United States, authorities are increasingly turning to Tiktok to reach their audience, says the American magazine The Washington Post.
In Finland, people under the age of 25 use Snapchat, Whatsapp and Tiktok the most actively among the social media applications, according to a study carried out by the telecom operator DNA Digital life study. According to it, the use of Tiktok and Snapchat decreases significantly, the older the generation is.
Tiktok’s popularity has also been observed in the way we consume news. Reuters Institute’s Digital News Report Finland’s country report according to Tiktok news use almost tripled in all age groups from the previous year.
The study estimates that both Tiktok’s growth in popularity and the increase in the news supply in the application must have contributed to this.
“For some people, such as journalists, researchers and politicians, Twitter is the main social discussion arena. Young people, on the other hand, are not active on Twitter,” points out the University Researcher at the Consumer Research Center of the University of Helsinki Essi Pöyry.
Essi Pöyry
Turmoil however, I don’t see that hacking Twitter favors Tiktok in particular.
“Twitter-related problems give other platforms the opportunity to attack its market niche. Some of the diligent Twitter users have already gone to Tiktok, some will never go. Now Metal is momentum to bring a Twitter competitor to the market, which is a bit of a copy of it,” says Pöyry.
At the beginning of 2022, Twitter had an average of 229 million daily user. In Finland, Twitter is used by 17 percent of Finnish adults, according to a report by the Reuters Institute.
“It will be interesting to see if Twitter users can make a collective decision to switch to another platform. After all, competitors have been offered to Twitter before, for example Mastodon, which hasn’t really taken off, however.”
of Twitter criticism and users’ threats to move elsewhere can also be seen as a natural part of the life cycle of every social media platform. Pöyry points out that no social platform grows indefinitely.
“Digital platforms have different types of life cycles. At the time, Twitter was a new platform compared to Facebook and blogs, it had something the same but something new at the same time. This is the typical way in which a new Finnish platform starts,” describes Pöyry.
Tiktok, on the other hand, brought an alternative to the image-oriented Instagram with its videos. Tiktok’s advantage is an addictive algorithm that extracts this interesting content for the user from all the content on the platform. On Instagram, the user mainly sees content from the accounts they follow.
However, Pöyry believes that Tiktok’s skyrocketing popularity is on the decline.
“Tiktok’s growth in Finland is limited by related data security concerns,” says Pöyry.
Tiktok is owned by the Chinese company Bytedance. Data security concerns have been especially related to the possibility that the Chinese state could collect and use the information of Tiktok users.
In the new What’s unique about Threads is that it’s very similar to Twitter. Pöyry believes that there is a demand for a text-based platform like Twitter and Threads, but the market may not have room for both.
In addition, Threads still has to wait in the EU due to data protection regulations.
“In general, it must also be remembered that social media platforms have a limited lifespan. It always changes which platform is the most popular at any given moment. The limits of growth will eventually be met, when a new service will come to challenge,” says Pöyry.
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