At the end of last year there was a lot of attention on Meta and the bet their CEO Mark Zuckerberg had seemingly made on being all in on the metaverse. Rebranding Facebook in 2021 to create this new offering of Meta signalled to many his intent to win in this space and invest everything in it, spending $13.7 billion in 2022 alone on the effort.

But as tech funding fell away and grey clouds grew over the economy, investors put pressure on Meta to invest less in this nascent space, reduce headcount and go back to what they had done so well for the decade previously, which is getting us to be social online while they advertise to us.

At the same time, in another part of Silicon Valley the controversial entrepreneur Elon Musk was buying and blowing up Twitter. Having overpaid, he reduced costs, opened up access to the previously banned and picked fights with many, including his own advertisers.

In the six months since he bought Twitter, revenue has fallen, users are complaining and the media can’t stop predicting the platform’s demise. It should be noted daily active users have apparently grown during this period, though there is no official data to go off with it now being a private company.

The journey of these two tech platforms, their leaders, their brands and our changing relationship with social media have brought forward Meta’s first new social offering in a long while. Yesterday Meta launched a Twitter-like product called Threads. At time of writing it had 30 million sign ups in the first 24 hours and the internet is unsurprisingly awash with opinions about it.

Launching a new brand is hard, let alone a social media app. There’s currently seven Twitter clones all trying to displace the much used, but supposedly hated, blue bird. All of them are trying to take the apparent tanking of Twitter as the opportunity to own public discourse. In every case they try to fix something that they think is broken and then build networks in a world that says it wants to be online less, not more.

Launching a new brand is hard, let alone a social media app. There’s currently seven Twitter clones all trying to displace the much used, but supposedly hated, blue bird

Threads is different in this crowd of clones. It cleverly utilises Instagram as the sign-up route, and has clearly made a bet that almost everyone that has a Twitter account has an Instagram account. This link is incredibly evident in both the strategy and the brand identity.

From a visual point of view the app opens with the logo, a stylised @ like symbol which then animates with the very familiar purple, yellow and red Instagram gradient. This then moves into an adapted UI from Instagram, making the whole experience feel very familiar from the start. It’s genius in a way, as it makes signing up a less lonely experience.

I quickly port all my Instagram connections over and I have a full timeline from the start, getting to critical mass quickly and encouraging me to join in. It also uses a strong semiotic symbol people associate with Twitter in the @. These two things combined I am convinced are partly driving the incredible take up. It’s a double dose of familiarity which is instantly social.

But in the longer term I think this will be its Achilles heel. The near term advantage makes the long term prospect harder. I might like someone’s photos on Instagram, but do I like their opinions? Instagram has a very specific experience and by tying the two brands together so closely can Threads ever be its own thing?

My feed is currently full of people trying to work out what to do with it, and that’s fresh and novel, but if it was a Twitter killer surely they would just port the Twitter experience over? Minus the parts they don’t like? Instead it feels like trying to combine the want for something different with Instagram makes it a little confused.

Instagram has a very specific experience and by tying the two brands together so closely, can Threads ever be its own thing?

The rest of the brand feels a little undercooked. The only other key visual is a series of snake-like shapes with the name throughout them, which has been heavily used in the media stories about the platform. This seems like an attempt to visualise the idea of Threads, but it feels a little busy and confused. My bet is it’s a liked piece of design from the creation process, but it doesn’t have a home.

All of this asks, what does a social media brand need? Typically a strong logo, a recognisable differentiated colour, something to build a system around. The formula for success to date has been to get people to unctuously open the app and scroll. The instant reflex of the finger on phone to app encouraged by the logo we’ve hit a million times. In this context, it’s interesting that Threads has gone for a recessive black and white at an app icon level.

Beyond the brand, within the app itself, social apps need the ability to market themselves more. But with Threads, we have a brand that is a clear sibling of one of the biggest social brands in the world and as a result it feels like it’s sat in its shadow. As an aside, it’s also a bit quizzical as Meta’s work social app Workplace also uses a play on an @ for its logo. In a stable of seven brands, I find this decision surprising.

Apart from the 2021 company reorganisation into Meta, the last meaningful brand extension was the launch of the now defunct Portal brand in 2018. An interesting product which got positive reviews, its brand never really had much of a presence. Previous to this Meta had bought Instagram, WhatsApp and Oculus, building a massive user base in the process, but not since Facebook ever really building a brand from scratch, and this feels very telling with Threads.

Brand is a vital part of connecting with people more and more and this brand feels like it’s going to need some solid work to be its own thing

Meta is a client at Koto and we have touched a number of their brands over the years. My experience is they are near peerless on product, and this product is built on the solid rails of Instagram. But the product alone is never enough, a brand is a vital part of connecting with people more and more, and this brand feels like it’s going to need some solid work to be its own thing, to explain its purpose, come out of the shadows and become the Twitter killer so many seemingly want.

Right now I would bet it becomes an extension of Instagram, for the more normal things in life, a Facebook status update for the 2020s, and that is just fine.

James Greenfield is CEO and founder of Koto; koto.studio