Intro: Do you feel like you were meant to have a kick-ass career as a hair stylist? Like you got into this industry to make big things happen?
Maybe you’re struggling to build a solid base and want some stability. Maybe you know social media is important, but it feels like a waste of time because you aren’t seeing any results. Maybe you’ve already had some amazing success but are craving more. Maybe you’re ready to truly enjoy the freedom and flexibility this industry has to offer.
Cutting and coloring skills will only get you so far, but to build a lifelong career as a wealthy stylist, it takes business skills and a serious marketing strategy. When you’re ready to quit just working in your business and start working on it, join us here where we share real success stories from real stylists.
I’m Britt Seva, social media and marketing strategist just for hair stylists, and this is the Thriving Stylist Podcast.
Britt Seva: What is up and welcome back to the Thriving Stylist Podcast. I’m your host, Britt Seva, and today, we are talking about the new app from Instagram, Threads.
This is the newest app in social media and as a business coach for hair stylists, we absolutely have to talk about this. But first I have to set the scene for you because it’s so funny and it reminds me of like recording my first podcast way back in, gosh, what would’ve been 2017, 2018, something like that.
So I’m sitting in the floor of my bedroom closet surrounded by my own shoes and my suitcases here to my left and I’ve got my baseball hats on the wall beside me. My voice is probably raspy because it is literally the crack of dawn. But this app was so important that I messaged my team and said, “We need to get the messaging and the information out about this as quickly as possible. Can we get this done in a 12 hour turn?” And they said yes. So I’m recording this podcast less than 24 hours after the launch of Threads.
I just want you to understand the timeliness of this specific episode. Threads the app is essentially an infant. It’s a newborn baby. A ton will change on the app in the weeks, months, year—potential years, I don’t know, we’ll see—to come with this platform, but I just want you to understand the recency of this episode.
I’m recording this literally less than 24 hours after the app has released. I’m sure things will change in the next four days between this moment right now and when this podcast hits the airways.
But I wanted to get out in front of y’all as you are maybe dabbling in the app, thinking about starting it, definitely hearing about it so that you understand if you need to prioritize it, how you should prioritize it, how it might serve you, how it might not serve you at all, what it means, why it’s here.
Let’s just dig into it.
First of all, getting down to basics. Threads is a social media platform just like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, I mean Snapchat if you call that social media, anything else, okay? It’s another social networking platform. Social media by design is anywhere that people are having conversation about a person, place, or business, so it definitely falls into that category.
The New York Times is calling Threads potentially the Twitter killer. That’s the big nickname for it. You’ll probably see it all over the place if you’re looking.
Threads is very publicly owned and operated by Mark Zuckerberg, who’s the CEO and owner of Meta. Meta is the parent company of most famously Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. He owns all three of those platforms and Threads is his newest venture.
Now, these aren’t his only ventures. Does anybody remember IGTV? He’s tried to create these spinoff apps before, so this is one of the latest of his trials.
What I think is important to understand is that this is very typical behavior of Meta and Mark Zuckerberg in some ways and it’s innovative in one other very specific way. I’ve shared this very openly on the podcast and on Instagram and other places before that very clearly the goal of Mark Zuckerberg, Meta (the parent company) is social media domination. I believe he wants to have a monopoly on the social media voice and you could have feelings about that. This is his Zone of Genius. He feels like he does it better than anybody else. What he wants to do is have full control over all social media platforms.
For the last three and a half years, we have watched him very openly try to take down TikTok. When you look at things like reels, even in some ways IGTV, like he really wanted—but reels very specifically—he literally paid out millions of dollars trying to incentivize people to start using reels, which I said from the jump was artificial inflation. People don’t want to be using it, but guess what? In some ways, his effort works. Millions of Instagram users flock to reels. Unfortunately, it wasn’t the kind of content that people wanted to see on Instagram, so some people blew up using reels, but if you look at what’s going on in their pages now, it’s a little bit like dead air because they blew up using this artificially inflated tool that Mark Zuckerberg, Mosseri, like everybody who’s a head honcho with these social media platforms, essentially tricked people, creators into using in an effort to simply blow the competition away.
The whole point of reels was so that Meta could get rid of TikTok. They tried to buy TikTok and were turned down and so they thought, “That’s okay, we’ll just bury TikTok.” Well, it didn’t work. What happened instead is people got very burnt out of the user experience on Instagram.
In their effort to have world domination by incorporating reels and doing all these things that were not initially native to the platform, they shot themselves in the foot. Now they’re in this very interesting situation.
Well, historically, Mark Zuckerberg/Meta/Instagram’s technique has been, “Let’s go for the next up and coming thing,” right? They want to come for YouTube Shorts, they want to come for TikTok. Well, now they’re choosing to go for what’s called the falling sword. Something that is seemingly on a downturn.
I don’t know if you follow social news or not. There is a lot of discontent with Twitter right now. Twitter is almost like the grandfather of social media. It’s one of the first original social media platforms. Most of us aren’t on Twitter regularly. I am certainly not. But what’s been happening with Twitter is it’s been struggling for quite some time and reached the peak of its struggle in the last few months.
Elon Musk, the owner and founder of Tesla, bought out Twitter and is making a lot of changes that people—some people are happy about. Most people are like, “What are you doing?” There’s a lot of control being placed on the platform. It’s interesting. He’s making major shifts to the platform that have a lot of longtime Twitter users upset.
So Mark Zuckerberg and the team at Meta said, “Wait a second. If this platform over here is failing, what if we can try to capture its audience?” That’s for me not just speculation. If you look at the quotes that are being pushed out by Mark Zuckerberg who still runs Facebook actively, Adam Mosseri who’s the head of Instagram, they’re both saying, “We pulled the trigger on this pretty quickly. We saw an opportunity, we’re seizing the day. We don’t a hundred percent know what we’re doing.”
They basically saw that Twitter was failing and tried to catch the market. It’s very important to understand that. I think because this app is owned by Meta, the parent company, a lot of us are like, “Oh, maybe this is the new Instagram.” It’s not.
There’s no doubt Instagram is a failing, dying platform. I’ve been talking about it for over a year now. I think it’s very obvious that it’s happening at scale. Usership is down, time spent on the platform is down, interest is waning, engagement is down. There’s a lot of issues with it. For months now, people have been asking, “What’s the next thing? What’s the next thing?” And I keep saying “Y’all, I don’t know if there is a next thing.”
It’s interesting because for so many years people have almost complained about Instagram, like, “Oh, it’s exhausting to have to try and keep up.” But now as it starts to fade into the sunset, people are like, “Oh shoot, what are we going to do without it?”
I want to speak to it from that perspective. I want to share a few facts and data, get into some of these speculation about Threads, and then get into my predictions for it.
Couple things about my predictions. I have a pretty good accuracy rate. I don’t know if I could put a percentage on it. If I had to, it’d be well over 90%. I’m pretty good at seeing the trends in these kind of things. You can go back and listen to past podcast episodes. There’s not a whole lot where I miss the mark.
So keep an open mind. I don’t have a crystal ball, but in seeing the trends, I want to share with you what I’m seeing, what I’m noticing, what I’m feeling.
This was a quote from Mark Zuckerberg. This came out on Wednesday, July the fifth, 2023. He said, “I think there should be a public conversations app with one billion plus people on it. Twitter has had the opportunity to do this, but hasn’t nailed it. Hopefully we will.”
That’s an ambitious goal. When you look at usership, I’m seeing varying numbers, but at the highest, at the very, very highest guess, Twitter has 353 million users. I don’t know if those are active, if they’re daily active. I’m assuming not. But that’s the highest estimation I can see.
Mark Zuckerberg wants three times that usership on Threads. He’s not looking to just catch everybody who’s falling off Twitter. He also wants to multiply usership on a micro-blogging platform like Twitter is. That’s ambitious.
Now, there’s some data that’s being shared that’s misleading that I think is important to understand. Like I said, I’m releasing this podcast right after Threads came out, or I’m recording it right after Threads came out. Within the last 24 hours, there’s been over 12 million signups. That’s a lot. We’re less than 24 hours out and I’m seeing numbers like that. 12 million people’s a lot of people and people are like, “Whoa, 12 million million, that’s a lot.”
You know what, yes and no. When you look at Instagram, Instagram has 2.35 billion users. When we look at 12 million, that’s not even 1%. 99% haven’t made the leap.
I’m sharing that at the top of this episode because I think it’s important for you to understand that yes, this is exciting. Yes, this is evolving. Yes, this is new and shiny and different. It will take a long time for this platform to establish itself, if it does. We don’t know. New platforms launch all the time. Does anybody remember Clubhouse or Lemon8?
We don’t know exactly where this is going to go yet, but what I do think is important to understand is when you see those big sexy numbers, like let’s say it gets 50 million users over the weekend. We’re still looking at less than 3% of Instagram usership. It’s a fraction and I just think it’s important to understand that especially when you’re thinking about where to spend your time, where to spend your energy, how to use this platform. It’s a baby and it’s going to take time to evolve.
When we look at what it should be used for and how it should be used, I have a couple more quotes to share and then some insights. This is from Adam Mosseri, who’s the basically head honcho of Instagram. He said, “The idea is to hopefully build an open friendly space for communities.”
Now what’s interesting is in the time I’ve spent on Threads, there is a countless number of posts saying, “Let’s let this one be positive. Let’s not tear each other down on this platform. Let’s have this one be good vibes only.”
The sentiment I understand. The message is very unfortunate and the message is also very aligned with most people’s take on social media right now. Over the last few years, like probably five or six years, the goal on social media has been to be in some ways be radical, be somebody who creates controversy, and that’s in some ways turned into be somebody who creates anger and that can create virality. That can cause someone to go viral. The problem is people are pretty burnt out of it. There’s enough hate in the world as it is, and so people—it’s interesting to see this very vulnerable outcry for can we have a place of peace? I am seeing that loud and clear on this app.
The reason I share that is because whether you choose to use Threads or not, to be candid, I don’t care if you use it or not. By the end of this podcast, I’m still going to say that. What I think is important is to not let this become what all other social media is and to take that lesson forward when you show up on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, wherever you are currently. People are really tired of the negativity, really tired of it, and it’s very clear as this new app launches, I think they’re maybe tired of battling that war on the existing platforms.
If it were me, I’d be bringing as much positivity, education, elevating messages as I could to the platforms I’m already established on because there’s an outcry for we’re sick of the drama. I think that’s very interesting to see.
I have one more quote from Instagram, Facebook, Meta. It says, “Threads is a new app that’s focused on text and dialogue, and the way that we think about this is we’re modeling it after what Instagram has done for photo and video.” Note that. They don’t want this to be a photo and video app. They want this to be a text and dialogue app.
Right now, it’s the wild, wild west. You can post whatever you want out there. They’re just hoping for usership. Great. Everything rides, everything gets pretty decent engagement on there right now.
You can’t mince their words, y’all. They’re saying openly they don’t want this to be a photo/video app. If you think you’re going to go on there and post your hair photos and photos of you and photos of your salon team and get a great result, you’ll likely not fare well in their algorithm. Right now, I don’t know that there’s even any algorithm at play.
For the next few weeks, you might be able to go on and post those things and get some decent reach. I don’t think it’ll last because I don’t believe that, at least at this time, Meta wants Instagram to fall and fail. They see this as the little sister of Instagram, not the replacement. We all are out here like what’s the next thing? This is not going to be a replacement.
With that, if you’re trying to repurpose your Instagram content onto Threads, I’m already noticing the engagement is not great. What I’m seeing is if people are posting innovative, new, fresh things on Threads that they’re not posting on other platforms, it’s doing decent because it’s like, “Oh wow, here’s new conversation.” The people who are like, “Oh, cool, I posted this on Instagram two days ago, I’m going to repurpose it to Threads,” it ain’t cool. They’re getting two likes, no comments. We’re looking for fresh content here.
And even when the owners of the platform are saying this is not where we want you to be posting photo and video, we want you to be posting dialogue, this could trip some people up. Not everybody is confident with their voice and their message and they feel more comfortable posting a pretty picture or posting a funny GIF and being like, “See, I’m funny.” Well, you’re not funny. The GIF is funny. Or posting a picture of their work and being like, “Look at me, I’m inspired.” Are you inspired? Or are you just talented? Your words are going to have to show that you’re inspired.
This is a mini-blogging app is what it’s saying. Mini-blogging app and those who are like, “Well, on Twitter, people post GIFs” who posts GIFs? Brand new accounts or accounts that are well established and already have a few million followers.
Y’all, don’t forget that. Anybody who’s jumping on Threads now is at step one. You can’t copy the efforts of somebody who’s at step 697 on a totally different app and get the result they’re getting. It doesn’t work like that.
One of my very first posts that I made on Threads was like, “I don’t think this is a platform where early adopters are going to win. I think this is a platform where those who are innovative thought leaders and choose to use this platform to truly give back and contribute are going to win.”
Let’s look at what that looks like for you. This platform is supporting original thoughts openly. There’s many statements about it. That means sharing GIFs, reposts, reshares isn’t what they’re looking for content-wise.
If you want to break out, if you want to get a push, creating original dialogue. They used the word “dialogue” several times and said this is a microblogging site. They want words, they want text.
And P.S., if you haven’t picked up on this yet, you should now. I’m not a huge fan of AI. I’m pretty hesitant about it. We don’t use it in my business at all. When you look at how AI works, it feeds on dialogue and written word. If anyone is working on a social media app today, they’re dumb for not asking people to incorporate words because if AI is the future, they need us to be typing words.
That’s the part that kills me a little bit inside is I’m like, “Perfect. We’re continuing to feed the AI machine,” and I have a lot of mixed feelings about that. But if you’re simply resharing photos and GIFs, you’re not helping this platform get to where it wants to be. If you’re saying, “Yeah, but I don’t care that the platform gets where it wants to be,” okay, then why are you using it at all?
We’re all ridiculous if our strategy is not to feed the machine what it wants. If you want to break it out into the algorithm, you have to give the machine what it wants.
Now if you’re like, “I’m going to use this platform, but I don’t care about giving the machine what it wants,” that’s fine. But then don’t complain when you have no reach. Don’t complain when you have no followers. You can use it just as your personal private microblog that nobody sees. That’s totally fine.
But if you want this to actually get you somewhere and achieve you something, you have to play in the way the app wants you to. And the app wants you to be a writer. 500 characters right now. It wants you to be a writer, not a sharer, not a reposter, a writer.
When you look at something like Thriving Stylist Method, I’ve been trying to teach you to write captions for eight years, right? When you look at Wealthiest Year Yet, we have all those caption writing prompts. This is where you’ll use those kind of things if you so choose to do so.
How should you be using this becomes the question. If it’s a writing platform and our industry is very visual, right? Like to show off your work and your talents and your brand and all the things, like we are a visual industry, how do you use this?
Okay, now I’m nervous. I like butterflies in my stomach. This is the piece that I think is most important. I shared this with Thrivers last week and now I’m sharing with you all publicly. I said about a year and a half ago, maybe a little bit more, that I didn’t think Instagram would be around in the way that it has been by 2025. I think it’ll, by 2025, it’ll be like a MySpace where it still exists but people aren’t using it at scale.
We’re already seeing people fall off at scale on Instagram. I mean millions of users at scale. Instagram, the wheels are falling off. Like I said at the beginning, people are asking me, “Where are we going to go next when Instagram falls apart inevitably?” because it will.
Over and over and over I’ve been saying the influencer culture is dying. It started dying in the pandemic and it continues to die. We’re seeing this resurgence back to more traditional marketing and nobody should be sad by that. Everybody should be happy. We’re in this age of authenticity and brand messaging and true marketing. That doesn’t mean you get to be lazy and that doesn’t mean you get to go back to being just the neighborhood stylist who hands out referral cards and is just word of mouth. That won’t work either. But what it means is reliance on doing funny reel dances and blowing up on Instagram, that’s all fading into the sunset pretty fast and it’s becoming who actually is worth their weight in salt?
It’s just changed quite a bit. With the demise of Instagram, I do believe that platforms like Threads is a way for our industry to stay connected. I think it’s our new networking platform. When you look at why Instagram is the favorite for stylists and salon owners, it’s simply because it’s where we like to connect with each other. As I say that, some of you are like, “No, no, no, I found clients there.” No, I know that and I know it’s been a huge source of clients for our industry for many years now, since about 2016. There’s no doubt. But there’s actually a lot of faster, easier ways to grow clientele than on Instagram. It’s become increasingly hard over the last five years especially and there’s just easier ways to do it. And as people flock to all those easier channels, like the Desire level of the marketing funnel, all the other Interest levels, the Awareness level. If you don’t know what I’m talking about when I say marketing funnel, you can head to thrivingstylist.com.
But as people flock to these other levels of the marketing funnel and other opportunities, I actually think that the biggest loss is going to be the industry networking that’s existed on Instagram for almost a decade now. I think that Instagram is what allowed the independent education culture to boom. I think it’s where a lot of us found peers, found our network, found our crew, found like-minded souls. And as Instagram falls apart, that’s dwindling a little bit.
I think that apps, I don’t know if it will be Threads long term, but apps like Threads are networking apps at their finest. What’s not working on Threads right now is when people are going on trying to sell things, trying to even sell themselves. It’s not working. There’s a lot of funny, funny posts on the app of people like, “How long till the marketers come along and ruin this? How long till the mommy bloggers come along and ruin this app? How long until some MLM company tries to sell me something?” Nobody wants that here.
I really, really, really think for our industry, you should not be using this to gain clients. Sorry, I said it and that’s the controversial tip I’m going to share.
Listen, in six months, I might say the app has changed and I’ve changed my mind. Right now, don’t worry about showing the last hair color you did unless you’re saying, “Hey, I did this hair color, it didn’t go well. Where are my stylists at? Can you help me to troubleshoot?”
Use this as a way to spark conversation, networking, vulnerability, supporting each other as stylists. I don’t mean become the next industry influencer educator. If that happens as a byproduct, amazing. If you go into this with that as your goal, you are going to be the person that people are talking about when they say, “Great. How long till the marketers ruin this?” “Great, how long ‘til someone tries to sell me something?”
Don’t go into this saying, “How do I monetize this app?” I don’t think that’s the right move. I think you go into Threads and you say, “How do I use this to truly build my network, connect, learn, share, educate, inspire, not gain clientele?”
I think clientele over the next five years is going to be gained through other channels and it’s time that we start leaning into apps like this for true community connection. I understand that as I’m saying this, it might not be what you wanted to hear, but you can’t always get what you want. But you might find, if you try, you get what you need.
And I think that in this moment, what we need to understand is this might not be about promoting yourself. This might not be about making money directly. This may be about the connection that we are going to desperately wish to hold onto in a few years when Instagram really falls apart.
I encourage you to use these next 18 months we’ve got left to build your network here of peers, of community with no other objective than to stay connected, stay aligned, find those who are like-minded, who can keep you inspired. I think, at this moment in time, this is the best way to spend your time on Threads. Make posts where you’re connecting with other stylists in a way where you’re not trying to show off. You’re literally trying to be vulnerable, connect, be relatable, share, inspire, help each other. Don’t try and be an educator. Do just try and be a good human, and I think you’ll have the best possible experience on Threads.
All right, you guys, 24 hours into Threads. Let me know how I did. I’d love it if you shared this on Instagram. Hit me up in the DMs, let me know what you think about it. Or better yet, tag me into a Thread.
Y’all, so much love, happy business building, and I’ll see you on the next one.
