Organic posts and brand-voice tests: how advertisers are approaching Threads

In April, Meta’s Threads, which counts over 350 million monthly active users, opened up to all advertisers.

Less than two months in, many advertisers are still in wait-and-see mode, media buyers told Marketing Brew, but some agencies are pitching spending on Threads as a “low risk, high learning opportunity,” Anna Hofer, group director of integrated media at Stagwell’s Assembly, said.

As more advertisers test out the platform, it could open the doors to continued investment from more cautious brands.

“Everyone wants to be the first, in a sense—safely. No one wants to jump on it, and they want to see what everyone else is doing, but they also want this as a new placement, a new opportunity, new reach,” Shatesha Scales, paid social supervisor at Rain the Growth Agency, told us. “When Threads first came out, people were kind of hesitant that it wasn’t even going to survive. Now that it looks like it’s really still out there kicking and people are engaging with the platform, I think [advertisers] feel safe.”

Slow and steady

As some clients begin to dip their toes into Threads’s waters, Scales is encouraging clients to interact with the platform through organic posting first. Having a strong organic presence can help make a brand’s presence on Threads more impactful overall, she said.

That could be easier said than done. Some, including advertisers, “are still kind of confused about Threads and how the general public [is] using it and also how they should be using it as a strategy,” she said.

Hofer said that for now, the platform can be used as a testing ground for brand voice and tone, rather than a place to drive sales. “We’re not seeing Threads right away as a conversion space by any means, but I think it’s a really nice place to have clients play with their voice and their personality,” she said.

There are some limitations for advertisers buying ad inventory on Threads; it can’t be bought alone and has to be paired with other Meta inventory. For that reason, Hofer is positioning the product as an addition to clients’ media mix on Meta.

Even if there isn’t rabid interest in the platform for now, some in adland see it as a more brand-safe alternative to X, which, despite its cultural clout built under the brand name Twitter, has experienced controversial policy overhauls under owner Elon Musk, affecting its user base and advertiser interest. Whether that perception lasts remains to be seen; Meta is testing Community Notes across its platforms, including on Threads, as a way for certain content to be flagged by community members instead of through the use of third-party fact-checkers, a move that has attracted significant advertiser concern.

More broadly, there’s that macroeconomic uncertainty, which seems to be many execs’ favorite phrase at the moment, due to near-record low consumer sentiment and the continued back-and-forth over tariffs. How much that will affect future ad spend across all platforms, including on less-established platforms like Threads, remains to be seen, but execs said they are being conservative in their spending.

“We’re not really jumping on anything crazy new or experimental at the moment,” Scales said. “We’re staying tried and true to our campaigns.”