PARIS — Meta has shown staff plans for a text-based social network designed to compete with Twitter.
It could allow users to follow accounts they already follow on Instagram, Meta’s image-sharing app.
Threads may be about to get another big boost from parent company Meta…at least in terms of sources of new content.
The company has been spotted testing a cross-posting feature that would allow Facebook users to post to both platforms at the same time, using the same feature that was originally available for cross-posting from Facebook to Instagram.
The company confirmed a limited test has begun, but is restricted to iOS and does not include the EU. The feature will allow users to share both text and link posts from Facebook to Threads, a rep for Meta said.
The addition could help content creators who regularly post photos or other media along with text updates from the hassles of having to post in multiple places.
It also ties Threads more closely to Meta’s larger app ecosystem, which could potentially give Threads’ app a boost, if the test rolls out more broadly.
Meta’s family of apps reaches 3.98 billion users. Even if only a sliver of those on Facebook used the cross-posting feature for Threads, it could still dramatically increase the number of posts available on the app.
Facebook added the option to cross-post to Instagram in 2021, after earlier offering the ability to cross-post Stories between the two platforms.
With last summer’s launch of its Twitter/X competitor, Threads, the company leveraged its other, larger social networks to rapidly grow the new service’s user base.