What Threads is and how to use it
A plain guide to Threads: what kind of network it is, how it differs from Instagram and X, how to sign in and how to start running an account.
Threads is a text-based social network from Meta, launched in July 2023. In short: a place where people write short posts and discuss them in the comments. The closest analogue is X (formerly Twitter).
How Threads differs from Instagram
Threads belongs to the same company and is tied to Instagram, but it works differently.
| Threads | ||
|---|---|---|
| The point | photos and video | text |
| How the feed looks | a grid of cards | a stream of messages |
| What people consume | they look at pictures | they read thoughts |
| Format of conversation | likes under a photo | discussion in a thread |
A Threads account is created on top of your Instagram profile — there's no separate sign-up. Your username stays the same.
How to sign in to Threads
There are three ways:
- The app for iPhone or Android — downloaded from the app store.
- The web version at threads.com — works in an ordinary desktop browser.
- Through Instagram — the Instagram app has a link to Threads in the profile menu.
You need an active Instagram account to sign in. If you don't have one, you'll have to create it first.
What to post on Threads
Threads is about conversation, not a storefront. Polished ad-style posts do poorly here; live observations, opinions and questions do well.
We analyzed 46,816 public posts on the platform and saw a few patterns:
About the data: these are observations from our sample of public posts, not Meta’s official ranking rules. The medians show associations within the sample, but they do not by themselves prove causation.
- Short texts get read more often. The median across the platform is around 80 characters. The most-discussed posts run about 130.
- Paragraphs matter more than length. A post broken into two or three parts collects four times more replies than the same thought as a solid block.
- A question at the end works — if it's genuine and about a specific thing in the post. A routine "how about you?" gives you nothing.
- Plain hashtags and a topic tag are not the same thing. Posts containing the
#symbol were rare in our sample and showed weaker response. Threads’ built-in topic tag works differently: Meta says posts with tagged topics generally receive more views. Choose one precise topic instead of a string of hashtags.
Comments do more than posts
The main thing about Threads: people notice you inside other people's discussions. Someone sees a sharp comment under a post they care about, goes to the author's profile — and follows.
So the "only post on your own page" strategy works worse here than on Instagram. An account grows when its owner takes part in conversations.
Where to start
- Fill in your profile: name, bio, link. Someone arriving from your comments decides by it in two seconds.
- Find 20–30 accounts on your topic and follow them.
- Comment every day. Not for volume, but for substance: a reaction to a specific detail of a post gets noticed; routine praise doesn't.
- Publish your own posts too — not instead of comments, but alongside them.
From there the work shifts to reach: how the algorithm is built and what to do so your posts are shown to more people.