777 – The New Kid on the Social Media Block: Tom talks Threads

Episode 777 - Threads
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody, it's Tom here with episode 777. That's triple sevens. Boy, that's a lot of lot of podcasts right there. Today, we're going to talk about an introduction to Threads, the new social media platform tied to Facebook and Instagram and all that stuff. So we'll talk about that in a minute. Hope you didn't miss Episode 776. That was Marc Wendt and this was a different the most different podcast I've ever done on this show, that's for sure. We got into crazy politics stuff and differing on opinions and oh man, there's some good tips in there, but boy, it's quite a bit different. If you want to listen to that, you go to screwthecommute.com, slash, then the episode number 776 for that one. All right. Make sure you grab a copy of our automation book. screwthecommute.com/automatefree and follow me on TikTok at tiktok.com/@digitalmultimillionaire.

[00:01:27] All right, let's get into the main event. All right. So here's the here's what they say. What the CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, said about Threads. He said, the vision for threads is to create an option and friendly public space for conversation. I can't help but laugh when I hear that you put me, you know, I don't know how many they got 100 million people in a couple days put together and see how friendly everything is. I mean, it's so ludicrous. It's just ridiculous. But he has a plan. He says he hopes to take what Instagram does best and create a new experience around text ideas and discussing what's on your mind.

[00:02:13] All right. Unless they don't like what's on your mind because you can get banned immediately for no reason at all. So that's one thing you should know about threads. And it's I mean, they go on to say it's he says Zuckerberg says, yeah, it's similar to Twitter. Twitter in several ways. But he stressed that one of the key differences is the focus on kindness and being friendly. I mean, I can't help but laugh at what a ridiculous statement he said. You can make that happen if you kick everybody off that you don't like, you know, sir. Sure. So anyway, Threads, It's a new app from Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, and it does look a lot like Twitter with and it's the feed is largely text based, but you can post photos and videos and and you can have real time conversations there. But right now it's only available on mobile. So you need to know that. And the meta, I guess. What? These name changes by these big companies because they got more money than brains and nothing to do has described threads as Instagram, text based conversation app. All right. So so anyway, Threads is going to have a 500 character limit similar to Twitter and users can apply to repost and quote others others posts. But it kind of, you know, blends, you know, in Instagram's look a little bit and navigation system. Now you can share posts from threads directly to Instagram stories, although from what I have been reading, doing that has already taken a dive in the younger market since they're more visual than us old farts, you know, so so that's available.

[00:04:14] You can share directly, but are they people using it? Not that much. Now you can also make a public or private account. And if you're verified on Instagram, you're automatically verified on threads. So you sign up through your Instagram account. So you have to have an Instagram account to have a threads account. And you can keep your same username and password and account name, but you can edit your bio to be unique on threads. I'm not sure why. I guess you can have different business accounts there. You can import a list of accounts that follow you on Instagram and so it's super easy really to get up and running on the app. However, the next part reminds me of that song, Hotel California. Remember that song? You can check in, but you can never leave. All right. You can't easily leave threads. You can temporarily deactivate your profile in the settings of the app. But here's what it says in the Privacy Policy. Here's a quote. Your threads profile can only be deleted by deleting your Instagram account. All right. So and also, a lot of people were raising concerns about the all the data collected by threads users, your location, your contacts, your search history, your browsing history, all all this stuff. So, yeah, they're gathering more and more stuff on you. All right. So let's try to predict the future a little bit. So testing has shown that threads has a high engagement now. Now, this was Neil Patel, a very well respected SEO guy, and he did they tested, I think, 308 accounts that came from taking stuff from Twitter and putting it on threads.

[00:06:19] That testing showed that threads has a high engagement now. And the key word to me is now. But is this engagement real? See threads has less content and the thing is new. So they're showing the content to as many people as possible. And I have been through this over and over. You know, I've been on the web since it started in 1994 and seeing all the comings and goings of these things and and see what's going to happen is eventually threads will reduce your reach. They'll they'll encourage you to kill yourself to get all this engagement and reach and everything. And then they're going to make you pay to reach your people just like they did on Facebook. I mean, it's just there's no question about it. This never fails. That's the way it works. So they can increase their ad revenue. Simple as that also. They really incentivized? I don't have proof of this, but this is the word on the street that they incentivized a bunch of influencers to overhype threads to try to take advantage of it early on to get their accounts built up. And that's going to eventually drop off or probably has already and see many of those. Here's the thing about influencers. If they're going to engage with you. The most, It's most likely and you can think about this logically, they're they're they call themselves influencers, which is kind of arrogant, you know, goofballs, crap.

[00:07:50] But anyway. If they engage with you, they're just trying to get you engaged back. That's it. They have no intention of caring about you. Be an evangelist for you, buying your stuff. Nothing. They're never going to be your customers. So that's what you're going to get early on in threads. You're going to get influencers or not the biggest ones, but micro the up and coming wannabes are going to engage with you to try to get engagement back and they're never going to do anything for you. Okay. In order to keep this nice, supposedly nice atmosphere. You know, like I said, 100 million people. Oh, you know, in a week or something. I don't know. Ten days. Right. Well, guess what? There's not going to be if they wanted to keep that nice atmosphere, there's going to be no debate on significant issues, just like the entire Covid area and the election era. I mean, and people are already getting kicked off immediately for no reason at all. So it's pretty much censorship has already begun in this. You know, So just realize that when you go in there. So to me, overall, this kind of seems like another big time waster that the marketing arena says, Well, you got to be on here. Yeah. And we also don't know what will happen when a browser version is released. Is that going to dilute it more? I mean, who knows? Another thing you should at least think about is that threads is not available in the EU market.

[00:09:27] Well, why? Well, because of privacy concerns in the Digital Marketers Act that they have. So, yeah, they're collecting all kinds of stuff on you to sell and make money. I like making money. I get it. But I'm pretty much honest with people how what I'm doing for them, not hiding behind the scenes and doing nasty things to them just to make a buck. Okay. Bottom line for me is that just like in my entire career online, I wait to see how things go. Sure, I might secure my accounts on threads, but be inactive. Probably not going to happen in the near future. There are many more immediately lucrative things you could be doing that actually pay bills and build wealth for you rather than Mr. Zuckerberg. Okay, So so keep that in mind. And if you want help on this and real life looks at these things from somebody that has been there since the beginning, then I'm your man. So check out greatInternetmarketingTraining.com. It's the longest running, most successful, most unique mentor program for internet and digital marketing ever. And I triple dog dare anybody out there any wet behind the ears people too to challenge me on that because you'll be embarrassed. So so if you really want some hardcore training from somebody that's going to work with you personally, along with my staff one on one, this is the place. Check it out. GreatInternetmarketingtraining.com. All right. We'll catch you all in the next episode. See you later.