Chris Dreyer:
Your organic reach and visibilities is going to be tremendous. Anywhere where individuals congregate is an opportunity to advertise.
Colin Sherrod:
Welcome to Personal Injury Mastermind! Each week you get insights and wisdom from some of the best in the industry. Social media moves at a mile a minute and every second counts if you want to stay ahead. So we’re airing a special bonus episode of PIM. But don’t worry, we’ll be back next week with our regularly scheduled interviews with the best the legal field has to offer. By now, you may have picked up that I’m not your regular host - Chris Dreyer. That's because today, we're flipping the script. Im Colin Sherrod, Sr. Marketing Specialist and Personal Injury Mastermind Ambassador at Rankings, and I'll be talking to Chris about the topic that's taking the world by storm - Threads. We’ve got a comprehensive guide so you can leverage the latest tech and dominate the competition. But first, a little background… The mobile app launched on Wednesday, July 5. By Thursday Morning, 30 million users had downloaded the app. To put this in context - Chat GPT had a record shattering ONE million downloads in five days. FIVE days after Threads launched, HUNDRED MILLION users had downloaded the app. It is the most rapidly downloaded app. EVER. This new social media platform is the latest offering from Mark Zuckerber’s Meta, the parent company of both Instagram and Facebook. But Threads looks and behaves a lot like rival Twitter. Think micro-blogs with a 500-character limit, public discussions, and well, aptly named, “threads” of conversations. In an era of users endlessly frustrated by the changes at Twitter, Threads just might be the final cut that kills the stumbling giant. I caught up with Chris to see if Threads really could be the Twitter killer.
Chris Dreyer:
Threads, everyone knows that works for me that I am all about Threads on Slack, I get angry when someone doesn't reply in a thread. It's essentially a competitor to Twitter. It is created by Meta. The interesting thing about it had 100 million users in less than a week, just tremendous growth. Mark Zuckerberg just cranked this sucker out in the background and it's just been explosive and it's a new social media platform.
Colin Sherrod:
When it first came out, I didn't know how big it was going to be, and then you just look at the stats and it is just taking the social media world into a whole new direction.
So being that it is very similar to Twitter, do you think that the algorithm is pretty similar to it as well, or does it mirror an algorithm from any other social media platform that we've seen so far?
Chris Dreyer:
I'm not positive about this, and that's a great question. I think that Elon open sourced the code, so Mark just took the code and implemented it and I'm pretty positive it's built on the same backend. The thing that I'll tell you is at the beginning all social media marketing companies. They follow the same monetization strategy. First, they tried to acquire as many users as possible, so they give a lot of organic reach and visibility to content in the very beginning. And then as that content becomes to saturate, then they make it pay to play. They'll turn on ads. In fact, they don't even allow advertising right now on there in terms of paid ads, but it's coming in the future. So there's a tremendous opportunity for a lot of organic growth right now.
Colin Sherrod:
We did see that a lot with TikTok when it first started out and a lot of other newer social media platforms as well. It seems to be a very consistent strategy across the industry. It seems like every solid marketing department in the world is trying to make sense of this new platform, including those of law firms. So first, let's start off with the basics here. Should law firms take advantage of Threads now and if so, why?
Chris Dreyer:
Put a yes and. The thing that I would tell anyone that has a social media strategy that can produce content consistently should be jumping on Threads and posting heavily. Threads, similar to Twitter, should contain multiple posts per day or one giant thread versus something like LinkedIn where you just want to make one post per day. There's different posting frequencies, but we're seeing it model very similar to Twitter, I would follow that. So on Twitter, there's recommended anywhere from five to seven posts per day to get kind of that maximum amount of reach and you don't get throttled. So I would absolutely tell any law firm that if they have a social media team, if they have a social media strategy to get very active now because your organic reach and visibility is just going to be tremendous.
Colin Sherrod:
Let's take it a step further. What could they be posting about? What do you think in your mind would be a good advantage for them?
Chris Dreyer:
This is going to be really deep. And I would check out the book Snow Leopard, it talks about creating your own category and how to create a following. So there's two trains of thoughts here.
The first train of thought is if you have something that appeals to all audiences, we've seen this with Mike Morris talking about pizza or Darryl Isaacs talking about weight loss and exercise or just motivational things like Gary V that can allow you the ability to create significant amount of subscribers. Now if you supplement that with talking about your expertise, that's where you just need to be aware that you're only going to appeal to a small market. So there needs to be a combination. Be aware of the pros and cons. If you want to speak to just the category, you're going to have a smaller follower base, but they may be really interested in what you do versus a larger follower base where you're talking about pizza or weight loss or motivational, things of that nature, things that's in the news, it's current events. And that's kind of the general strategy that I would take.
Colin Sherrod:
Yeah, I really like that. It seems like from the get-go you want to apply to a very large audience, being that you do have such a larger organic reach on Threads, especially right now before there's paid ads it seems like the perfect time to combine those two strategies and really build up and ramp up your following and mention a bit in the background, "Hey, by the way, I also do this. This is my practice. If you find yourself in any bad situations, please reach out to me."
Chris Dreyer:
And the other thing I would say in regards to topics, and I'm not going to push any political leanings here, what I will say is Twitter is more right centric. Elon's come out and been very vocal that he's very on the right wing type of side. Now Meta and Mark Zuckerberg has leaned more significantly on the left. So the type of content there may lean or orient itself more on the left and just be aware of that. I think both can succeed. But they definitely have created kind of this division. And I think that's one of the main reasons, honestly, that this was created is because of this political divide.
Colin Sherrod:
It's really interesting that it's gotten to a point where social media even has political divides within the factions that have created the platforms rather than factions within each platform talking to each other. So I'm going to take it back real quick to where you mentioned earlier that Threads is very similar to Twitter, and I wanted to pick your brain a little bit on this. Is it that existing organizations can use this same strategy they had on Twitter for Threads being that this platforms are so similar?
Chris Dreyer:
I think a lot of the strategies could apply. Now, if you're working with a social media department, I'm not aware of any software that allows the capabilities to post directly to Threads from the software to aggregate out to multiple channels. So you're going to have to do that manual. I think it's a matter of time. This came out of left field and these software companies just didn't know. So it'll come with time, but right now you get a post manually. I think you could take a lot of your historical content and add it to Threads. I think that could absolutely be a strategy. And actually I would highly recommend that you take your most popular tweets and implement that on Threads.
Colin Sherrod:
I really like that idea, especially being that these days it seems like social media really pushes to create more new content instead of recycling your old content,, which for social media guys like me can be a little stressful sometimes where you have to constantly pump out something new. But you're saying to go back and recycle some of your old Twitter stuff into Threads in that way you can maybe soften the blow and work your way into this new platform.
So speaking of that trend where it seems like content is being less and less recycled these days, do you think that Threads will continue on this trend with the way that it is? Or is this something that might, as you've said with this new strategy, fight against that decreasing shelf life of each piece of content?
Chris Dreyer:
Really good question, and as we know, LinkedIn has zero shelf life. So when you post on that platform, your post is gone and they don't have a method of keeping all that content archived in an accessible fashion. You're going to have to post with frequency, with volume. Here's the deal, and it's an agency owner's worst nightmare when they're trying to manage social media that everyone scrutinizes every little word or comma or image, but our attention span is so fleeting on these social media networks. So you just need to post and execute and not ruminate too much on the type and quality of the content that you're putting out there. Hormozi and many individuals have the saying that quality comes from quantities. If you're only posting once a day or once a week, you're not going to have enough quantity to understand what the audience is looking for to see which really go and take off and are viral. So you need to post a lot to determine what's going to work for this platform. It's really new. No one has the recipe and you need to determine that yourself.
Colin Sherrod:
So taking all the information that we've just talked about, would it be fair to say that law firms can get in front of this, I guess, issue, so to speak, where it takes a lot of content on Threads from the get-go. They can get around it by recycling content from Twitter and maybe some other blogs or other written sources they would have and then just continuously post that throughout the day. But also implementing a good amount of relatable content, such as you said, weight loss, exercise or making food, just anything that people could relate to from a very broad standpoint and combining that all together. Do you think that would be a good step for them to take?
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah. Curation is going to be your friend here. So take content that you already have out there and post and then introduce new content to the platform over time. But at the beginning, I would start with curation.
The other thing too is when we're talking about these just broad topics of food or weight loss or whatever, Gary V talks about this, it's the easiest way of creating content is documenting, not creating. What does that mean? That means that whatever interest you have in life, talk about those interests and those experiences because it will be way easier to create content around those topics.
Colin Sherrod:
In the world of content creation, it's very easy to see when somebody is doing something because they're seemingly forced to versus when they are really pulled to doing it. It's almost you can feel the passion through the phone screen. And for me at least the content I watch, I really like stuff where people are just living their everyday lives, doing their everyday things, it makes them seem much more relatable. It's almost like I have a friend on the other side of the screen just sharing with me what they're doing.
Chris Dreyer:
Yeah, I have this thing and this is a weird humor about me, but anytime someone gets hit in the head and they make a loud sound, I just think it's hilarious. So any of those, shovel to the head or baseball to the head, maybe that's a little morbid but I just think those are hilarious. So yeah, jam out. Post the things that you're interested in, I'm sure other people will think those are funny or memes or whatever. And just have fun with them. Don't overthink it. You have to execute. You have to post a lot of content to really stand out.
Colin Sherrod:
Yeah, that makes sense. And even from an efficiency perspective, if you're just enjoying your hobbies it's really not that hard to just set up a camera behind you or make a quick blog post about what you're doing and go about your day. It takes some of the guesswork and the thinking work out of the whole equation.
So going back to just kind of the state of how Twitter is right now, without throwing too much shade to them, it seems like another key feature of Threads is that it's a much more stable and consistent platform. IE, there isn't somebody at the wheel just spinning left and right trying to see what happens, it seems like that was a big detractor to a lot of Twitter users. First, do you believe that this feature will be the straw that breaks Twitter's back? Will this be the thing that switches everybody over from Twitter to Threads or do you think that both will still have a place?
Chris Dreyer:
It's absolutely not going to break Twitter's back, they have $3 billion in revenue... Actually I think it's $3 billion in revenue and I think they're approaching 3 billion users. There's too much activity, too much adoption for it to just kill it. There's too much money behind it. Now, put it decrease its growth? Yeah, especially when Threads starts to introduce ads and things like that. But it's definitely not going to kill it. And I do like the simplicity. There's an art in simplifying things and bringing it down to its core. Even when I talk about SEO, I break it down into three main pillars as opposed to talking to hundreds little granular signals. So I think there's an art and a science behind that.
I think that it'll have a place, it's going to be its own thing. I think there's a place where both, I think that you could take a lot of the content and post it on both areas and be successful. Do not think that Twitter's going away. I know Elon's saying some crazy stuff here and there. He's innovating all the time. He's trying different subscriber methods to paid subscriber methods, and he may get lucky and have a home run. I mean, look at the verification. How much revenue did Musk increase his meta stock just by doing the verification over there? So who knows what he'll come up with? And that's one thing you can say is he's definitely trying new things all the time.
Colin Sherrod:
So Chris, I got one final question for you, and this is looking very broad and into the future. Do you think that Threads will have a permanent spot in omnichannel marketing strategies? And if so, what could law firms do this very moment to help prepare for it?
Chris Dreyer:
Oh, theory. I think it'll have a permanent place. I think the amount of users that have transitioned from Facebook to Instagram to Meta, it's all very integrated. I think the ads platform would be very integrated. I think it'd actually be more conducive. The ads platform on Twitter historically has been just terrible, I think Zuck and his team have a better grasp on what it takes to do the ads side of things. So yeah, I think it could.
Here's the thing about advertising. Anywhere where individuals congregate is an opportunity to advertise. In the beginning, people were focused on cable TV and everyone watched cable TV. Well, now it's shifting to OTT and everyone uses Google, so there's search engine optimization, search engine marketing. It already has 100 million users in the first week, so it has eyeballs, it has attention, so it will absolutely be a place to advertise.
Colin Sherrod:
What makes Threads user-friendly is its familiar interface. It mirrors Twitter's design and functionality. You can log in with your Instagram account and follow the same people, avoiding the growing pains of adopting a new platform. If you've got your phone nearby and want to give Threads a try, follow along with me. Getting started with Threads is simple. Download the standalone app from the Apple or Android Store. Log in with your Instagram account and you're all set to explore. Your handle on Instagram has been reserved on Threads, so no worries that someone else has already snatched yours up. The Threads and Instagram worlds are interconnected. Verification on Instagram rolls over to Threads, and you can cross post your Threads on Instagram as a story or link, and you can start posting right away. Once you're in, the experience is akin to Twitter but with an Instagram design flare. Following an account on Threads is simple too. Click the search icon in the lower left corner, type in the name of the account you want to follow like PIM.community and hit that follow rectangle to the right of the account name.
Thanks for tuning into this special bonus episode of Personal Injury Mastermind. Follow us at PIM.community on Instagram and Threads. Let us know how you're using this new platform to beat the competition. I'm Colin Sherrod. Chris Dreyer will be back in his regular role as host on the next episode of PIM. See you there.
