Naleen Camara, Senior Social Media Specialist at Amtrak, explained why and how Amtrak decided to join Threads during the PRNEWS Pro workshop "Social Media and Influencer Marketing for PR."
Naleen explained Amtrak's process for assessing, testing, observing and finally finding success on the Threads platform, which is a model for any brand considering joining a new social platform. Watch the segment here, or watch her full session, "The New Platforms on the Block," by following the link.
Full transcript:
Threads is another platform that we've joined in the last two years and have found success on, but it wasn't always like that. And in the next few slides, I'll talk through why we decided to join Threads and how you can apply the same methodology for other emerging platforms.
So before joining a new platform, it really is important to investigate your why, investigate your motivations. Why do you even want to join this app? When Threads was announced, we were skeptical. mean, myself as a private citizen was pretty skeptical about joining Threads because maybe a few of y'all remember that Threads, when it first came out, was so new and so reliant on your Instagram account that you could not delete your threads account without subsequently deleting your Instagram.
And as somebody who is a chronic deleter, that was a little bit too much commitment for me. So I was a little nervous about it, you know? So that's the same thing that other folks were thinking about when this app was unrolled and just unveiled as the next best thing for Meta. So you really need to have in your mind why you even want to do these things. So when we were thinking about it, you know,
We have to consider a few questions. And so I listed a few of them out for your own personal consideration. So when you're thinking about a new app and in this case, threads, what is it? You know, what is it in the first place? How will it function? Is it just another Instagram? How does it even work? Why is it here next? Who's on threads? What kind of people are joining? Why are users on threads and what are the behaviors like? And finally, what resources are at your helm to support threads?
Are the in-app features any good? Have they been integrated on any social management tools? Do you have the people power to run it? Well, let's answer a few of those questions. Okay, so starting at the top, threads is Meta's answer to X. Neither here nor there, but I'm sure a lot of y'all realize and remember that X was kind of going through a pickle sometime last year or back in 2023. And it was a little weird. And...
This is a platform that Meta had already been working on. They had it in the works for a long time. They saw an opportunity and they leapt on it and threads became new and it became real for a lot of people. So it is a text-based emphasis on text-based micro blocking app that was created by the Instagram team. You can connect your threads account to your personal Instagram page, like I noted in the beginning, which is super helpful because if you are verified on your personal Instagram, you will then be verified on your threads account, which is helpful for recognition as people are looking for you on this new platform.
Who's on threads? Well, it's mostly going to be your pre-existing Instagram following and network. Why are users on the platform? Well, they like how seamless the connection is from their Instagram, a platform that's visual-based to threads, one that's text-based audience. You know, something that I also remember hearing a ton when I was like in high school, college, was a lot of folks talking about how they weren't on the good side of Twitter.
They didn't really know how to, you know, really engage in the popular tweets, any content that was always trending. They couldn't seem to find it. And threads is a little bit more approachable because of the Instagram affiliation. You know, they have that positive brand affinity. So people really enjoy the fact that they can kind of, you know, combine it, put it all together. And people also feel more inclined to use it again because of their Instagram affiliation. They trust it more. It just, it's a little bit more seamless.
It's not as intimidating as X and a former Twitter. And the real kicker is that there is currently, as we speak today on April 15th, tax day, there is currently no in app ad placements, which is a really big sell. People do not like to be explicitly sold to as they're scrolling down their feed. Now, implicitly sold to that is another session that I'm sure one of my colleagues can talk to you all about, but threads at this point in time, no ads, we love it.
So we decided to join threads because it sits at the cross-section of Instagram and X. Again, you really get that Instagram audience while producing X like content. Excuse me. It's not necessarily necessary to have an overly produced piece of content as you do on Instagram. It's more casual and conversation is way more encouraged.
Because you can't have tons of conversation in the comments of an Instagram real, if we're being honest. People will do it anyways. And lastly, at the time we had the people power to support threads output. In the beginning, threads was kind of DIY. It really required a manual push and you couldn't schedule, reporting was non-existent and it wasn't yet a platform that could be added to our social media management tool, Sprinklr. I can't speak for the others though.
And it was really important for us to have an extra person who could support that because yeah, it was a full effort. You had to really keep an eye on it. Additional steps that we took toward onboarding threads was testing it out on our own personal accounts. So as I noted in the beginning, I was super skeptical and apprehensive to create a threads profile on my own, but that's when, you know, little tips and tricks, you can create a burner account. You can just have a random spam account that you use, a Finsta, that you could do these testings on. It doesn't have to be on your brand's account.
You could definitely try it out on your own through whatever handle that you create. And if you don't even want to go as far as that, you can reach out to your own community. You can talk to your peers, hey, are you on threads? What do you think about it? How are brands showing up on this? What's annoying you? What's not annoying you? Like, give me the scoop. So that's something to also consider when you are thinking about these new platforms.
And so once we felt comfortable enough in those answers, we took it into the next stage, testing. So I present to you our three phases of our thread strategy in post-form, represented by the stages of a chick. A chick, not chicken, because we are still getting to learn the platform as they create new updates, but you know, we're out of the egg, which is nice. So in the beginning, when we were just a wee egg, we relied on existing content from X to fill our threads feed. So...
being very honest, know, the user base on threads supersedes the user base on, excuse me, the user base on X supersedes the user base on threads. At this point in time, X has about a hundred million US users versus threads that has about 33 million US users. So it completely blows it out the water and there's just way more folks on that app. So it was honestly inevitable for us to kind of overlap the content that we were doing there.
So, in this post, featuring our popular original character, anime conductor, promoting stations along Beyonce's 2023 Renaissance Tour stops, was doing super well on X, so we cross-posted to threads to keep the momentum going. There are Beyonce fans everywhere, including myself, so it's really easy to kind of, know, re-listen, so that was an easy one. So we did a little bit more of that for a few weeks, cross-posting that is, while getting comfortable on the app.
In our middle phase, we started playing with in-app features that differ from other platforms, like this neat pinching feature where you can join two photos together to create one, which is really cool. And lastly, we are out of the egg and we've become pretty comfortable with the platform. Our social management tool, Sprinklr, integrated threads, and we've fully embraced it, so much so that we factored it into our recording benchmarks, which is great.
And while we still sometimes cross posts on both threads and X, we've approached it strategically, considering when it's useful to post on both versus the other. It's still a text-based app at the end of the day. And when we're trying to communicate certain ideas, it's easier to streamline the two platforms.
So since joining in 2023, we produce over 350 pieces of content for threads, which is super exciting. And here are our three top posts since joining the platform. And how lovely is it that our top post of all time was literally made last month. There was a dig at Southwest Airlines. If you were a Southwest customer, I'm so sorry. It was just an opportunity and we had to take it. We still love them.
But these three posts resulted in about 72,000 engagements and over 2 million views. And again, you'll notice that these are all text posts work with the platform. Again, it is text based and that's what you have to produce and it'll reward you for it.