Episode 206: Meta’s Threads – The Next Big Thing in Social Selling or a Passing Fad?
As our job is to help salespeople and business owners leverage social selling to grow their businesses, part of that is making sure we know the latest tools that can help them reach their goals. That means actively testing and assessing the effectiveness of these tools, finding out what works and what doesn’t.
On this episode of The Making Sales Social LIVE, we’re sharing what we learned about the latest Social Media Platform by Meta – Threads. This new social media app has garnered over 100 million registered users in less than a week. We will explore its potential for improving sales performance and whether it’s worth investing your time in. Join us now to find out if Threads is just a fad or an opportunity for your business to thrive.
View Transcript
Bob Woods 00:00
Welcome, Social Media and Social Selling fans to Making Sales Social Live, brought to you by us, we, whatever you want to say at Social Sales Link. You’ve got two thirds of us here today. I’m Bob Woods, the LinkedIn Sherpa and I’m joined by fellow LinkedIn and social selling professional who is also known as the LinkedIn whisperer, Brynne Tillman.
Brynne Tillman 00:21
Right, Bob. Oh, good things I know, I’m excited to talk about today.
Intro 00:28
Welcome to Making Sales Social Live, as we share LinkedIn and Social Selling Training Strategies and Tips that will have an immediate impact on your business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, every week, Making Sales Social Live! This is the recorded version of our weekly Making Sales Social Live Show.
Brynne Tillman 00:51
As we open this up, that typically what we talk about, we have years of experience testing. You know, we have deep knowledge and have spent so many hours working with clients understanding what works and what doesn’t work right now, collectively, maybe we’ve got 10 hours.
Bob Woods 01:14
Yeah, I probably am. But I don’t want to admit that publicly. So Yeah.
Brynne Tillman 01:22
So what we’re talking about.
Bob Woods 01:24
Yeah, So as Brynne alluded to, We’ve got another one another social media platform that is, threads from Meta is without a doubt, the hottest social platform to hit our phones, probably ever. And I say that because threads surpassed the 100 million user point earlier this week. And as of nine hours ago, quiver quantitative estimates, it’s now up to 107 million. And it didn’t even take a full week for threads to hit that 100 million mark. It’s just incredible.
So threads. Yeah, it’s most definitely a thing now. I’ve been at it since the beginning. I remember the number 1,838,118. Brynne has been on it for several days too before we deep dive into what we can deep dive into when it comes to social selling any just proverbial thoughts on threads overall, before we do the deep dive.
Brynne Tillman 02:25
Well, I mean, obviously threads have good timing, Right? Where Twitter is taking a pretty deep dive and for many reasons, and one of them being “Hey, you’ve got to pay for the blue checkmark in the beginning” I was like, “Yeah, I’ll pay. I want a blue checkmark.” I’ve always wanted a blue checkmark. I just canceled mine, by the way, and I just canceled mine.
So right, like, I think that in some ways, threads are free. It’s not there yet, and we’ll talk about that. But I’m excited to see where it goes. I will also say most of what Facebook launches fails and LinkedIn launches things and then they’re like, “Oh, we did it for six weeks and it didn’t work.” So let’s retire it.
Bob Woods 03:12
So guilty of that big time lately.
Brynne Tillman 03:15
Yeah, But Facebook, they launched a branch out, which was supposed to be the LinkedIn version. I remember that. So we’re going to talk about this. I’m not going to jump too far ahead. But ultimately, they need to roll out features that will keep people on because right now it’s kind of a bare naked lady. Like, Yeah.
Bob Woods 03:39
Yeah, exactly. So yeah. So that’s actually.
Brynne Tillman 03:44
Banned reference. Not uh, yeah. For the listeners. I don’t want to. Yeah, I’m gonna get so many emails on that. I thought you were.
Bob Woods 03:54
We are now turning into a FM morning zoo program here. Today we’re going to talk more about threads. So actually, let’s focus in on threads and the current feature sets so as Brynne said, “Yeah, It’s pretty bare right now, it’s posting is and here are kind of like the high points.” There are obviously others that we won’t get into but the ones that we probably care about the most are posting wise, it’s 500 characters.
So it is a little better than the original Twitter when it comes to that. So you got 500 characters to deal with. You can link to external sources. You can do photos right away, including animated GIFs although sometimes it has problems taking up loads of animated GIFs. Asked me, How I know, and because I did because I have failed a couple times myself. And it can do videos up to five minutes in length, which is a little different from Twitter.
The video part is interesting. I’m not This is something that I’m really still not sure about if videos actually belongs on threads, because it’s supposed to be a little different from Instagram in that it’s much more text-based and much more conversational, whereas Instagram is obviously a little more, “Hey, I’m an influencer.” And I don’t necessarily care about what people have to say. Threads are about conversations, threads are about community.
So it’s kinda like Twitter back in the good old days, and I’m talking like 2007, when I first started on Twitter, that’s when it was fun. That’s when people were building communities. I was in a couple of kinds of communities, in air quotes on Twitter back then. And it was fun. And there were a lot of good discussions and exchanges of information and things like that, this was before it descended into the swamp and cesspool that it is nowadays.
So all that being said, “Threads are missing several things that other socials have, that we in social selling kind of depend on.” So direct messaging is one thing that’s missing, although from what I understand, and actually one of the product heads from Meta actually dropped a link into a thread that I had, that seemed to indicate to me that they’re not only planning on it, but it’s probably going to be in a way similar to what direct messaging is on Instagram, if that may be more tightly, integrating it with Instagram.
And it might also use Facebook Messenger too. So it is planned, it’s just not there yet, the next thing is separate for you. And the following tabs. If you’re a Tiktok user, you know that this is pretty big for you. The algorithm driven following is much more based on the people who you follow right now. It’s all kind of jumbled together. And it’s kind of a mess, you can’t even sort by latest and top, which is something that you can do on LinkedIn, for example.
So we have that going on Edit functions and posted threads right now you can edit those searchable hashtags, which I think is huge. You need to have searchable hashtags, there’s no doubt about that. They don’t right now. Yeah, they don’t have that right now. And then the ability to do deeper searches for users right now you can literally search I think by just username, and maybe the person’s real name. And that’s it.
There’s nothing else involved there. All of those are some of the big features that we need in social selling. So that’s why I’m saying that the ultimate viability of using social selling on threads is it’s really going to depend to a certain extent, not everything, but to a certain extent, on the features. It’s gonna roll out in the future. What do you think about that, Brynne?
Brynne Tillman 08:03
Yeah, I mean, there are so many things that aren’t here yet. But what I’m blown away by is the numbers, you sort of said, “We’re up to 107 million people on this platform.” And I’m sure because it was so easy to directly link it from your Instagram.
Bob Woods 08:21
Threads have a lot to do with it.
Brynne Tillman 08:23
And it was so easy to do. And I didn’t have to really fill out my profile. It did it for me, it brought things over. So it made it really easy. I’m challenged with a few things. And I like a few things. One of the things I’m liking is very similar to when you upload a PDF, or pictures to LinkedIn on the home page. It has a carousel.
Bob Woods 08:48
Carousel, that’s neat.
Brynne Tillman 08:49
And threads have that and I really liked that experience. And so you can tell stories you can pull up. It’s not just a collage. It’s a flipbook. Right? And so I think that’s really cool. And so if they bring out features continuing to bring out more features that Twitter doesn’t have along with the features that they do have, we’re going to be great. So definitely hashtags. I would love to categorize beyond hashtags if possible.
Maybe we can tag specific categories like hashtags, you could have sales, sales tips, sales and marketing tips, sales strategies, and to find all of those and this is a frustration on all social media for me to find all of those you have to bring in all of those hashtags. But what if we had categories and subcategories ?
Bob Woods 09:50
That’d be cool.
Brynne Tillman 09:51
Yeah. So there are a lot of things I’d love to see that are not anywhere yet. That I think if we stick to this same ol, same ol hashtag, I have a feeling it’s not going to have the same exciting impact.
Bob Woods 10:07
Yeah, that’s a good point. And then that’s actually something that I never thought of, especially when you consider that for our Instagram posts, you’re actually supposed to keywords are you’re actually supposed to hashtag stuff and right in this case, LinkedIn is algorithm specifically dings people when they do that.
Which I think is good because it makes you think about what you’re going to actually categorize these things under Instagram encourages hashtag stuffing. And I really, really hope that that mindset doesn’t come over to threads just because I’ve seen some Instagram posts that are just mind-boggling in terms of how many hashtags that they have there.
Brynne Tillman 10:48
I agree. So hopefully, we’ll see some new stuff there. I’m having fun with this. I’m having fun. I didn’t realize when I pulled this over, I should have because I do social media for a living, that I immediately followed everyone that I was on Instagram. What I noticed. And I again, like I have literally 10 seconds of experience here. So I didn’t want them. I could be saying something that I am missing. But some people I followed right away and some people had except my follow.
Bob Woods 11:25
Yeah, I noticed that too. And that’s something that I’ve noticed, I really haven’t dived into why that is yet I have a feeling it has something to do with their privacy settings over on Instagram. Beyond that. I don’t really know. But that’s a very interesting point.
Brynne Tillman 11:47
Yeah, so I love Jennifer Willner. I’m done with hashtags. posts should be more content rather than using fake hashtags not relevant. Yeah, I feel like appropriate hashtags are great. We use a hashtag, hashtag SSL insights. So that most of our content whenever we use it can be found in one stream. So I would love to continue to do that. And there is a place for hashtags. But I would love a better way to categorize your content and make it found easier by the people that want to consume it.
Bob Woods 12:21
So before we get to the communities on threads, because I do think that that’s going to be the ultimate driver, I had a thread hit my timeline literally 35 minutes ago from Matt Turk. I think it’s how you pronounce his last name from FirstMark Capital, which is a New York City VC firm, he says, and this is really interesting. The company that should have launched threads is actually LinkedIn, real identities.
In other words, no guy Fox profile pictures, etc. And I’m reading directly from his thread right now: existing professional graph, huge network, and opportunity to transform the content tone on the platform from humblebrag to meaningful conversations among industry participants. And I do think that there’s a threat of truth there, because threats are literally no, no pun intended there.
Because I do think that even though you know, we as social sellers, we do encourage free conversations and things like that within our own posts doesn’t necessarily happen like that all the time. They’ll for whatever reason, and I think it’s the mindset of other people who are using threads, there are a lot more real true conversations going on on threads than there are on LinkedIn right now.
Brynne Tillman 13:36
Absolutely. And you know, it’s interesting, because the culture of commenting on LinkedIn is Great post. Thanks for sharing. Yeah. So you’re right. It does not really encourage conversation. And we’re threads. I’m seeing some really healthy debate threads. I’m seeing some I have not engaged with yet. I’m the kind of learner that served for a while. I mean, literally, I think the only post I put, like, “Hey, thread peeps, how are you using your business development?” So now I like watching and listening.
Bob Woods 14:12
And yeah, yeah, whereas me, I tend to like to go in headfirst. And sometimes I will balk my head on the bottom of the pool when I go in headfirst. But, the beginning. And I do think that things are being shaped on threads right now that are more user-driven, as opposed to what meta wants for threads, and maybe they coincide. Maybe they don’t, I don’t know, it’s just I’m not really sure what Meta’s ultimate thinking is with threads.
But I do know that Meta does really want to encourage communities on threads, which is the next thing that I want to talk about. So you know, it’s kind of like LinkedIn where not every industry is necessary on LinkedIn, I want every industry to be on LinkedIn. They’re all just not there. And that’s just the way it is. But like LinkedIn, if your industry verticals on threads, you have the opportunity.
And this is a unique opportunity now, because threads are barely a week old, you had the opportunity to be one of the first people there to help out people in your vertical with questions with comments. And one of the things that I’ve been seeing in threads that I think have been very successful, because I’ve used this myself is that because discoverability is so difficult on threads right now, you have people who are listing other people in their vertical to follow.
And I think that those threads alone, and yes, I did mean to say threads that time, those threads alone, I think are hugely valuable and, and deliver value. Because this is something that threads, the platform is not really offering right now. And that’s actually one of the tips that I’m going to have farther down below because I do have a couple tips for people who are social selling, but you know, there are likely some people out there who you want to have conversations with on threads, you just got to find them. And that involves the algorithm a little bit there. And there is an algorithm.
Brynne Tillman 16:22
I mean, I’m literally playing with it as we’re here. Right? And one of the things, one of the things I liked about Twitter, you could share a link to a tweet. And I’m looking and maybe I’m wrong, but I’m looking at Bob Woods, and I click on the three dots and it unfolds, mute, hide or report. There’s no link to the thread, unless you.
Bob Woods 16:47
Actually you can, you can do that. It’s a good paper airplane. Feed, tweet, copy, link, and then share video. And then when you share via that’s when a bunch of the other socials will pop up, including Twitter, including LinkedIn.
Brynne Tillman 17:12
That’s Great. So if you want to start drawing in engagement, that’s perfect. You can, right yeah, you can now bring that I’m going to do one of those today. I’m going to do a thread and link it to a post. Yeah. And I think it’s interesting. Now I’m also hoping we’ll see on LinkedIn, you could click a little box. And every time you post, it can tweet out for you, which I typically do. It wouldn’t be nice if threads become an integrated option when I share them.
Bob Woods 17:49
Yeah, I’m not. I’m not so sure it’ll be integrated very tightly with Twitter just because of the shenanigans and high jinks of LinkedIn.
Brynne Tillman 17:57
On LinkedIn.
Bob Woods 17:58
Oh, LinkedIn? 100%? Yeah. 100%. I’m just saying just in general. I don’t know if I’d expect that from Twitter.
Brynne Tillman 18:07
Twitter, Twitter has a direct link and API link into LinkedIn. So you can actually if you add your Twitter, when you share content, you can have it automatically tweet out. So I’d like it. And so what are we going to call it? Are we going to Twitter if we tweet, what threads are going to be, We so?
Bob Woods 18:27
Yeah, you know, as there are people talking about that one of the first things that I posted about on there was we need nomenclature, we need these types of things to be named because Twitter got all this stuff named eventually. I’m pretty sure that that was all community driven, though. So I have a feeling that the community is going to decide this.
Brynne Tillman 18:50
So it will be and it’ll become, like new words in the dictionary, but I know exactly. I’ve struggled with Twitter tweets. By the time I knew about Twitter, tweets were already here. I am curious what threads are going to be? And is it all going to be around the idea? Because they have the thread, Right? So there’s some string or yarn or whatever it is in mindset around threads? Is it conversation going to be, Yeah, the hen? I don’t know. Yeah.
Bob Woods 19:28
And my wife just started sewing again, she would appreciate that. So with that, let’s get to the question that I’m sure is probably on a bunch of people’s minds. Can threads be used for social selling? So my take is, yeah, I’m not 100% sure yet, only because the features aren’t built out yet. It’s going to be interesting to see more once they roll out.
But the one big thing that I think is good is that may He start you in a direction towards whether or not deciding whether or not you should be on there and actively using it is your community, the audience of people that you want to attract and to start having sales conversations within a non-salesy way, If that is if that audience is on there, because it ain’t on there, forget it. You don’t need threads.
Brynne Tillman 20:25
But it will be though I’m gonna say, they will be. And I know that you mentioned you, there are certain industries that are not on LinkedIn. And it was way worse, like teachers, and initially physicians and nurses, and mechanics. And so for a long time, none of them were on and we knew there were industries that had a big gap inside. But as the years go by, it’s interesting that a lot of them have profiles now because it’s their professional resume.
We’re not saying any, but that’s why they’re on. And so I believe that almost everyone if threads take off, I mean, almost everyone I know in the professional world has a Twitter, whether they use it or not, I don’t know, but almost everyone has one. And even if you just want customer service from your electric company, you need Twitter. So let’s see if this translates into threads. But I do think if it does succeed, just be there now.
Bob Woods 21:42
Yeah, just yeah, just be there. Be there, be there, maybe drop some stuff every once in a while just to have some presence, maybe drop some value-added content. If you’re like, “Hey, everything that I’m doing right now is working well.” I don’t know if I need threads, you may want to be there and may just do some stuff every once in a while just to have a presence there.
Because what happens if threads really take off, and everybody all of a sudden really wants to be there and you’re just starting out, I don’t think you want to be in that position. I think you want to have a presence there at least even if it’s not a great presence, you want to at least be there.
And if you don’t have Instagram, you have to sign up for Instagram first and then do that. So just make sure that you know that and there’s all the privacy things about meta and everything else too, which we won’t get into here. But I do think that that is a concern for some people. So just make sure you know about all of that as well.
Brynne Tillman 22:38
You can sign up as a company though, Right? Yeah, like sign up as a company. Yeah, we need a brand. So it doesn’t have to be personal. Yeah, that’s a good point. If you feel like that, that’s important.
Bob Woods 22:52
Yeah, definitely. So. So stitch Jennifer. That’s funny. Call them threads.
Brynne Tillman 22:59
That’s funny.
Bob Woods 23:02
Oh, I love that. That’s great.
Brynne Tillman 23:05
So yeah, yes, my stitch. Maybe one comment is a stitch.
Bob Woods 23:09
There you go. That’s it. Yeah, they don’t have to be long. I mean, actually, they can’t be long, because they’re only five 500 characters. So with that, I got a couple of starters, Social Selling Strategies.
Brynne Tillman 23:22
Oh, good.
Bob Woods 23:23
I do, I come prepared. So the first one is actually my old Twitter channeling strategy that can be used just as well here. In fact, you can do this on any platform, as long as within the profile of the platform, you can provide a link to an external source, which Instagram has that even Facebook has that you can also do this on threads. So just have your LinkedIn profile URL as that link so that you can push people to LinkedIn.
And that you can actually start potentially those sales conversations on LinkedIn because there is direct messaging on LinkedIn. I think that until threads comes up with its own DM platform strategy, whatever, this is probably the best way to get started. An added bonus is that when you do see people come over to LinkedIn from threads, you’re not going to necessarily see that they came from friends from threads, rather, but they will show up in who’s viewed your profile as long as our settings allow that type of exposure. So I do that.
The next one is what I mentioned before, build and share a list of people in your community because again, discoverability quite frankly, sucks on threads right now. You if you are seen as that resource by doing nothing more than just collecting ads of the people who are in your community and start gearing that you’re automatically going to be seen as a thought leader, at least because about all these other people in your community, what better way to be a thought leader than saying, “Hey, I follow these other people, I’m going to help you follow these other people to really helps you to become an organizer of your community.”
The other big one, I think, is, as you know, we had a lot of interest in this podcast episode ahead of time, because not everyone knows about threads, feed into that teach how to use threads in your community, everyone can use help on this be seen as a leader in your community by teaching threads, especially if there are ways that you could figure out how to use threads specifically for your community that your community can benefit from? Man, will you be a thought leader at that point.
And there are plenty of articles out there that can easily help you generate content for this. As long as you have like web ChatGPT with ChatGPT, you can even have that as well, you can even ask ChatGPT to because web ChatGPT gives you real-time access to Google and it will be able to search Google because it can’t one is just ChatGPT right now you need that web ChatGPT extension for Chrome to actually do that with ChatGPT. But that’s a way to like, maybe even generate some ideas on how you can help people within your community. So before we conclude, Brynne, any ideas or anything like that?
Brynne Tillman 26:38
Yeah, I think this is about nurturing right now, it’s not a prospect for white players. Right? We can’t really search and find people easily once we can, then we can engage and move it into trust-based conversations for sure. But if you look at it right now is its content branding and nurturing platform. It is an important piece of social selling to be out there.
And, again, I don’t know what it looks like to have all kinds of engagement versus sharing. We don’t know the algorithm and all the other things, but to your point, Bob, just show up. Be there. Be an early adopter. I think if it does take off, it’s going to have a huge impact on branding and thought leadership. And if it doesn’t take off well, it’s just another.
Bob Woods 27:44
Yeah. Oh, man, I love blab. When the blab went away, we didn’t know about it, because that was another hot minute type of thing. But blab was a video based platform where people could pop in and out. It was great.
Brynne Tillman 28:03
So it was a video clubhouse.
Bob Woods 28:05
Yeah, video. Yeah, yeah it was kind of a video clubhouse that just never took off. And so sad.
Brynne Tillman 28:11
If I actually think it took off, and they retired it anyway.
Bob Woods 28:15
Oh, that’s right. Yeah. Well.
Brynne Tillman 28:17
I don’t know.
Bob Woods 28:18
They just, it was weird.
Brynne Tillman 28:19
They probably ran out of money. I mean, that’s what happened.
Bob Woods 28:22
Yeah. VC said, yeah, that’s.
Brynne Tillman 28:25
We don’t have to worry about threads. They’re not money.
Bob Woods 28:31
Because money hopefully not as long as I keep on keeping, keeps the money flowing. So as it’s been a hot minute since threads was released, as we’ve been saying all along, we truly can’t say if it’s a viable social media channel for social selling. It’s going to depend on features and it’s going to depend on your community.
You’ve got to have your audience there. So that’s why we’re saying “Be there in the beginning.” So follow Brynne, me on LinkedIn. And I’m threads and we’ll update you on the continued rollout of threads in our posts and whether or not we think that it’s cool or not for social selling, and somewhere down the road depending on how all of this stuff shakes out.
We’re probably going to have another podcast episode where we’re going to reexamine things and let you know our updated opinions. Does that Sound like a plan, Brynne?
Brynne Tillman 29:18
Sounds like a plan maybe if you if you’re the audience out there if you know of anyone who’s killing it on threads, no one is yet but as you see, yeah, as it rolls out there people are killing it on threads.
Bob Woods 29:29
You know there are some people that are killing it on threads, but they’re more of the influencers and comedy and people like that. I mean, business-wise, I don’t think there are but there are some people who are actually doing really well on threads.
Brynne Tillman 29:42
So I’m going to crowdsource this. I’m going to crowdsource So, if you guys see someone who’s killing it for business development, introduce them to Bob and he’ll interview them.
Bob Woods 29:53
There you go. I would love that. I would love that. And if you know anyone at Wendy’s because My god! Wendy’s is crushing it. and they have the most bizarre content, but it works. It works so well and you wouldn’t expect that out of a Wendy’s but they’re doing it well.
Brynne Tillman 30:09
Can I go off-topic for a second? Oh, absolutely. So little known facts about my family. My niece Morgan Smith. Goodwin was the Wendy’s in Wendy’s commercial for the three-year stint where it was my niece.
Bob Woods 30:29
I knew I recognized that name when you said it. Yeah, I know exactly who you’re talking about. That’s incredible. That’s something so we went off on another thread there. Another thread.
Brynne Tillman 30:41
Oh. I wonder Oh, here’s a feature if then threads. If you think this is discussed here, if you think that discuss it here.
Bob Woods 30:51
There we go, Meta. Are you listening?
Brynne Tillman 30:53
Are you listening? I love lightning.
Bob Woods 30:55
Okay. I kind of hope they are actually so. Thanks again for joining us in Making Sales Social Live. If you’re with us live on LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook or Twitter right now. Maybe it’ll be threads one day? I don’t know. Well, I have to say, we do this every week. So keep an eye out for our live sessions.
If you’re listening to us on our podcast, go ahead and subscribe if you haven’t already. If you want more info on the podcast, it’s socialsaleslink.com/podcast. We do two shows weekly. We do this one and our interview series where we talk with leaders and experts in sales, marketing, business and many more areas.
If you know of threads experts who can help us in social selling, we would love to do and we would love to interview them for the interview series. So let us know. In the meantime, when you’re out and about, Be sure to make your sales.
Brynne Tillman 31:46
Social.
Bob Woods 31:47
Thanks, everybody. Have a great day.
Outro 31:50
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