Meta Threads Together Some Serious Business Tools: The 2023 CRM Conversation Starters

When Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, decided earlier this year to end Live Shopping on Instagram, many called it a massive blow to social media marketing. Facebook had already stopped allowing live shopping links in posts on its site in August 2022, and Instagram had previously ended its in-app shopping tab.

Then Meta in July launched Threads, a social media platform that closely mirrors Twitter, which has been rebranded as X. Though still very new—and the subject of a lawsuit from Twitter/X owner Elon Musk, Threads is already generating a lot of excitement. According to Meta, the app garnered 30 million downloads in just its first day.

Threads allows users to post up to 500 characters. It is linked to Instagram’s photo-sharing app; people will be able to use their Instagram usernames on Threads and follow the same corporate and personal accounts on Threads as they do on Instagram. They can also like, share, and comment on other people’s posts and share links, photos, and videos.

And while it still has a long way to go to build, scale, and retain an audience, many in the CRM world are predicting that Threads will have very positive advertising impacts for Meta, its companion Facebook and Instagram sites, and the larger advertising and e-commerce worlds.

Forrester Research principal analyst Kelsey Chickering, for example, notes that though Threads still has many challenges ahead, “the easiest part for Meta will be monetizing Threads, because if there’s one thing the company excels at, it’s advertising.”

Meta, Chickering says, already outshines Twitter/X in its advertising offerings, commands the lion’s share of social media budgets, and has the most mature offering across the social media advertising spectrum.

Meta, she said further, “consistently delivers unmatchable scale, efficiency, and sales performance.” At the same time, “Twitter’s reach and growth trajectory aren’t notable, and advertisers haven’t seen great performance with their lower-funnel advertising.

“Meta’s advertising backbone will position Threads as a strong Twitter alternative because it will be set up to slip into Meta’s dynamic actions and deliver results across the customer life cycle,” she added. “Meta will enable Threads to deliver ad experiences that meet customers at every stage.”

Meta is reportedly looking to add to Threads with search capabilities and a web version of the app. Its last most significant upgrade was the “Following” tab, which allows users to see threads from the people and companies they follow in chronological order.

But Threads isn’t the only significant product launch from Meta with serious business implications. Of note is its July release of Llama 2, an artificial intelligence model for chatbots. The company made the open-source model, developed with Microsoft, freely available for commercial use. It received more than 150,000 download requests in its first week.

Furthering its belief that messaging will be the key to allowing businesses to grow and better serve their customers, Meta continues to rack up integration partners for WhatsApp, its messaging platform with more than 2 billion active users worldwide. Just some of the companies that in the past few months have created WhatsApp connectors include Zendesk, Braze, HubSpot, NetHunt, and Sendinblue.

And in late August, the company announced that the Kustomer AI-powered conversational CRM platform that it acquired in 2020 for $1 billion would undergo a major integration with WhatsApp. With just a single click, businesses can easily connect their WhatsApp Business API with Kustomer’s CRM platform for proactive customer outreach, providing critical updates and personalized messages, automation capabilities, and seamless chatbot-to-agent handover for smooth customer experiences.

“Messaging is how people and businesses want to communicate and get business done. Businesses of all sizes are embracing this shift and finding new opportunities to better engage with customers, offer support, and drive sales,” said Kyle Jenke, director of partnerships for business messaging at Meta, in a statement.