Threads by Meta, is it worth it?

What is Threads by Meta?

Threads is a text-first social media platform built by Meta (the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp) that launched in July 2023 as a direct competitor to X, formerly known as Twitter. You sign up using your Instagram account, which means your username, verification status, and follower base carry over.

The idea behind Threads is straightforward: short-form text posts of up to 500 characters, with the option to include images, videos, links, GIFs, and polls. If you have ever used Twitter, the format will feel immediately familiar. The feed shows a mix of posts from accounts you follow and algorithm-recommended content.

What separates Threads from X is its integration with Meta’s wider ecosystem. Your Instagram audience is already there. Cross-posting between the two platforms takes seconds. And Meta Business Suite now supports Threads alongside Facebook and Instagram, which means managing your business presence across all three sits in one dashboard.

QED Web Design has been active on Threads since launch week as @WeAreQED, and one thing we have noticed is that the platform rewards personality over polish. Stiff corporate updates get ignored. Conversational posts, opinions, and questions tend to perform far better. For the kind of small business owners we work with, including those in hospitality, recruitment, and trades, that is actually good news.

How many people use Threads by Meta in 2026?

As of January 2026, Threads has approximately 450 million monthly active users and 137 million daily active users worldwide (Resourcera, 2026). The platform doubled its monthly user base from 200 million to 400 million in under a year.

To put that growth into context, Threads reached 100 million sign-ups within five days of launching in July 2023, smashing the record previously held by ChatGPT. After an initial surge, usage dropped sharply. Daily active users fell from 49 million to around 10 million by late 2023 (Backlinko, 2026). Most people wrote it off at that point.

They were wrong. Meta kept shipping features, and the users came back. By December 2024, daily actives had recovered to 100 million. By June 2025, that figure hit 115 million (TechCrunch, 2025). Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s head, confirmed the 400 million monthly milestone in August 2025.

The misconception that Threads was a flash in the pan is one of the most common we hear from clients. The data tells a different story. Threads is adding roughly 1 million new sign-ups per day (Meta Q4 2025 earnings call), and Mark Zuckerberg has stated publicly that he expects it to reach one billion users in the coming years.

For UK businesses specifically, the picture is a little different. UK daily usage currently averages around 3 minutes per session (The Social Shepherd, 2026), which is considerably lower than in markets like the US, India, and Brazil. India leads the pack with 54.2 million users, followed by Brazil at 36.4 million (DemandSage, 2025). UK-specific user counts have not been published by Meta, but the platform is live and growing here, especially now that social media strategies are increasingly multi-platform.

The user base skews younger and male: 57.85% of users are men, and the 25 to 34 age bracket makes up the largest segment at 28.75% (Buffer, 2025). Worth noting if your target audience sits in that demographic.

Threads vs X (Twitter): which platform wins for business?

Neither platform is a clear winner across the board, but Threads currently offers better engagement rates and a less hostile environment for brands. Where X still has the edge is in real-time news and embedded niche communities that have been there for years.

Here is how the two compare on the numbers that matter. X reports roughly 600 million monthly active users, though third-party trackers like SimilarWeb have suggested the real daily figure is closer to 132 million on mobile, and declining year-on-year at around minus 15% (inBeat Agency, 2025). Threads, meanwhile, is growing at pace, with daily actives up 127% year-on-year by mid-2025.

Engagement tells a clearer story. The median engagement rate on Threads sits at 6.25%, compared to 3.6% on X (inBeat Agency, 2025). That is a 73% higher interaction rate on Threads. However, average engagements per post still favour X (328 per post versus 58 on Threads), because X’s total user base remains larger and its power users are more entrenched.

For UK small businesses, the practical difference often comes down to advertising trust. Since Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, many major advertisers have reduced spend or pulled out entirely, citing concerns over content moderation policies. Meta’s advertising infrastructure, on the other hand, is mature, well-documented, and already familiar to anyone running Facebook or Instagram ads.

One limitation: if your business relies on real-time breaking news, political commentary, or very niche professional communities (journalism, academia, UK politics), X still has a stronger foothold. But for general brand visibility and conversational engagement, Threads is now the more predictable choice.

We will cover what this means for advertising spend in the next section.

Does Threads have ads, and should your business use them?

Yes. As of April 2025, ads on Threads are available to all eligible advertisers globally through Meta Ads Manager (Meta, 2025). Meta is continuing to expand Threads ads into the UK, EU, and Brazil through 2026 (Marketing Brew, 2026).

Meta first tested ads on Threads in the US and Japan in January 2025. By April, the rollout expanded to more than 30 countries. The Threads feed placement is now on by default for new campaigns using Advantage+ or Manual Placements, though advertisers can opt out.

The ad formats currently available include image ads, video ads, and carousel ads in 4:5 format. You do not even need a Threads profile to run ads on the platform; Meta lets you use your existing Instagram or Facebook creative. Advantage+ catalogue ads and app install campaigns are also being rolled out.

Here is what makes Threads ads interesting for small businesses: the platform is still in its early advertising phase. Competition for ad placements is lower than on Instagram or Facebook, and CPMs (cost per thousand impressions) are estimated between £4 and £8 (MonetizeMore estimates via inBeat Agency, 2025). That will not last forever, but right now there is a window of relatively cheap inventory.

A word of caution, though. Meta’s own CFO, Susan Li, said in January 2025 that the company did not expect Threads to be “a meaningful driver of overall impression or revenue growth in 2025” (CNBC, 2025). Translation: the ads are early-stage. Do not expect the same targeting sophistication or conversion data maturity you get from a seasoned Facebook campaign. Test it, but keep your main budget where it already performs.

For our clients at QED, we always recommend that paid social should complement, not replace, a solid website SEO foundation. Threads ads are worth testing, but only if your site is already converting the traffic you send it.

What are Threads Communities and why do they matter?

Threads Communities are public, topic-based discussion spaces within the app where users can find and engage with people who share their interests. Meta launched over 100 Communities in October 2025 and expanded to more than 200 by December 2025 (TechCrunch, 2025).

If you have used Reddit or X Communities, the concept will be familiar. Communities on Threads are organised around topics: books, basketball, tech, design, food, and more. Each community gets its own custom feed, its own like emoji, and badge recognition for active contributors. Posts tagged with a community topic appear in that community’s feed, making it easier for your content to reach people beyond your existing followers.

Communities evolved from what Threads users were already doing informally. People had been referring to “Book Threads” and “NBA Threads” long before the feature officially launched. Meta recognised this organic behaviour and formalised it, which is a pattern that served Twitter well in its early years (hashtags, retweets, and quote tweets all started as user inventions).

For businesses, Communities create an opportunity to participate in topic-specific conversations without feeling like you are shouting into the void. A restaurant in South Devon, for example, could join food-related communities and share opinions, behind-the-scenes content, or recommendations rather than posting promotional material that nobody engages with.

The limitation right now is that businesses cannot create their own Communities. Meta controls which topics exist, and the current list skews towards entertainment, sport, and pop culture. Industry-specific business communities (marketing, hospitality, recruitment) are still thin on the ground. That will likely change as the feature matures, but it is worth knowing where things stand today.

What does the fediverse mean for Threads users?

The fediverse (short for “federated universe”) is a network of interconnected social media servers that communicate using the ActivityPub protocol, an open standard maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Threads is gradually integrating with this network, which means your posts can, in theory, be seen by users on Mastodon, WordPress, BookWyrm, and other federated platforms.

As of mid-2025, Threads users with public profiles (aged 18 and over) can opt in to fediverse sharing. Once enabled, your Threads posts are published to ActivityPub-compatible servers, and users on those servers can follow you, like your posts, reply, and repost (Meta Engineering, 2024). In June 2025, Meta added a dedicated fediverse feed and the ability to search for fediverse users from within Threads (TechCrunch, 2025).

Meta claims Threads has interacted with over 75% of all fediverse servers since launching the feature. That sounds impressive, but the fediverse is still a niche space. Mastodon, the largest federated platform, has around 1.4 million active users. Bluesky, the other notable Twitter alternative, runs on a different protocol (AT Protocol) and cannot currently communicate with Threads.

For most UK small businesses, the fediverse integration is not a reason to join Threads today. It is a technical curiosity rather than a practical marketing channel. But for anyone building a content strategy around WordPress (and given that WordPress powers roughly 43% of all websites globally), the possibility of your blog posts flowing into Threads via ActivityPub is worth keeping an eye on. We covered the broader WordPress ecosystem recently, and this kind of cross-platform interoperability is something that could become genuinely useful as the protocol matures.

One caveat: the fediverse integration is not yet available in the EU due to regulatory concerns around the Digital Markets Act, and rollout in the UK has been limited. Meta has not given a clear timeline for full interoperability.

Is Threads by Meta worth it for UK small businesses?

Yes, but it should not be your primary platform or the centrepiece of your marketing strategy. Threads is best treated as a supporting channel that builds brand personality and drives supplementary traffic.

The UK’s Online Safety Act came into force in July 2025 (Ofcom, 2025), placing stricter obligations on platforms regarding content moderation and user safety. For businesses, this means a generally safer advertising environment on platforms that comply, and Meta’s track record on compliance is stronger than X’s.

From a practical standpoint, the case for UK small businesses on Threads comes down to three things. First, if you already have an Instagram account (and most small businesses in the UK do), you are already halfway set up. Your username is reserved, your followers can find you, and Meta Business Suite lets you manage everything in one place. Second, organic reach on Threads is currently higher than on Instagram. Buffer’s 2025 content experiment found that open-ended questions and conversation starters outperformed every other content type on the platform. Third, three out of four Threads users already follow at least one business (Meta, 2025), which means the audience is receptive to brand content.

At QED, we ran our own informal test over six months, posting the same content on both Threads and X. Threads consistently delivered more engagement per post, though X generated more link clicks. That aligns with how the platforms work: Threads is built for conversation; X is built for broadcasting.

The exception to the “yes, use it” advice is if you are already stretched thin. Running five platforms badly is worse than running two well. If your website content and SEO are not in shape, fix those first. Social media drives awareness. Your website converts it.

How to use Threads for business marketing

The best approach to Threads marketing is to treat it as a conversation channel rather than a broadcast one. Post opinions, ask questions, reply to others, and show personality. Here are the specifics that work.

Claim your handle. Even if you are not ready to post regularly, log in and secure your business name. On Threads, your handle matches your Instagram username, so if you already have @yourbusiness on Instagram, it is yours on Threads too. If someone else has claimed it, you will need to resolve that through Instagram’s name dispute process.

Post conversationally. Buffer’s research found that posts with open-ended questions generate the most reach on Threads (Buffer, 2025). Static updates and reposts from other platforms underperformed. Ask your audience something. Share an opinion. Respond when people reply.

Use images. Despite being a text-first platform, posts with images consistently outperform text-only posts on Threads (Buffer, 2025). You do not need polished graphics. A photo of your team, your workspace, or your product in context works well.

Post midweek mornings. Data from Buffer suggests that Wednesday at 7am aligns with peak activity on Threads, particularly among the 25 to 34 demographic. In the UK, that translates to catching the early morning scroll before the workday starts.

Cross-promote from Instagram. Brands that share Threads content on their Instagram Stories see measurably better engagement than those trying to grow Threads in isolation. Use the built-in sharing features rather than copying and pasting.

Join relevant Communities. Find topic tags that relate to your industry and contribute genuinely. Do not spam promotional posts into community feeds. Share knowledge, join discussions, and let your profile link do the selling.

Do not abandon your website. This is the point we keep coming back to at QED. Social media platforms change their algorithms, their terms, and their reach overnight. Your website is the only digital asset you fully control. Threads should drive people towards your site, not replace it. If your site is not up to scratch, we have written about what makes a trustworthy UK business website.

The bottom line on Threads by Meta

Threads by Meta has moved well past the “is it just a fad?” stage. With 450 million monthly active users, global advertising, Communities, and fediverse integration in progress, it is a legitimate platform with genuine momentum.

For UK small businesses, it is not the most important thing you will do this year, but it is worth 15 minutes a day. Claim your handle, post something conversational a few times a week, engage with your community, and let the platform work alongside your existing Instagram presence.

The businesses that will get the most out of Threads are the ones that already have a solid digital foundation: a website that works, content that ranks, and a clear sense of who they are talking to. Social media amplifies what is already there. It does not create it from scratch.

If you want to make sure your website is ready to receive the traffic your social media generates, get in touch with QED. We will take an honest look at where you stand and what would actually make a difference.