August 1, 2023: Ignite Social Media today released a groundbreaking study revealing insights into the behavior and performance of 50 leading brand accounts on Threads, Instagram’s latest social network. Launched only three weeks ago, Threads has been a topic of intrigue in the social media marketing community, with brands curious about its potential.

Of the 50 top brands analyzed, six (12%) opted to remain on the sidelines, not posting at all. This left a total of 44 brands actively engaging with their audience on the platform.

Key Findings:

• Post Frequency: The study hand-captured 1,196 posts from the active 44 brands. A significant 43% of these posts were shared on launch day, indicating an initial enthusiasm among brands. However, there was a noticeable decline in the days following, with an 87% decrease in daily post frequency the rest of the launch week compared to launch day. The next full week saw a further 61% decrease from the first full week.

• Engagement Patterns: Brands experienced a surge in comment engagement on launch day, accounting for over 12% of total engagements. This trend, however, did not maintain momentum as engagements overall decreased nearly 75% by the third week, and comments accounted for only 7.9% of engagements by then.

• Benchmarking: Early data suggests that a brand’s Threads follower count is between 3.4% and 7.6% of its Instagram following and an average of 7.8% of its Twitter following.

In the first week, engagement rates averaged 0.3% -1.0%; however, by the second week the average performance had dropped to 0.1% – 0.3%. The highest performing engagement rate in the second week was 1%.

(Note that engagement rate here is calculated as likes + comments/followers as time of collection. Data on link clicks and video views are not available, nor are we able to determine impressions to use that as the denominator.)