UNLEASHING CREATIVITY: THREADS DELIVERS DRAFT MAGIC AND SCHEDULES SUCCESS

Get attention, and a narrative. Instagram’s baby is still trying to find its place. It doesn’t have as sophisticated a line of features as its mother yet, but it’s now getting closer than ever. The newest features being tested on it, such as the ability to have multiple drafts and the option to schedule your posts, are a real game-changer. But not in the way you might think. Instagram scheduled posts were hugely hyped and then somewhat irrelevant; Threads scheduled posts are a quantum leap. Here’s a hint: Remember Stories being stagnant for four hours? That’s a thing of the past, daddy-o.

THE DAWN OF MULTIPLE DRAFTS: A CREATIVITY CATALYST

The multiple drafts feature in Threads is a notable marker of how users could soon be encouraged to create and adapt. So, for instance, let’s say you have the first post of a thread, but you feel like the second post isn’t right yet. The feature will enable you to save your first version and tweak the second. You can do this for as many posts as you want and share only when you’re absolutely sure the post is ready to go. As the social media consultant Matt Navarra spotted on 2 February, the feature is still in testing with a limited user group. ‘Instagram confirms it’s working on multiple drafts for Threads,’ he said on his blog, sharing 11 screenshots with Instagram’s on-screen commentary about the feature.

SCHEDULED POSTS: MASTERING THE ART OF TIMING

Post scheduling marks a new era of premeditated content publishing. Thanks to this new feature, users can dictate the time of a post’s release to get the most reach and engagement. It presents an opportunity for creators to incorporate consistency and thematic relevance into their newsy stream, ensuring that each share counts.

BRIDGING GAPS: THREADS' AMBITIOUS LEAP FORWARD

Although Threads launched as a full-fledged messaging app in 2020, it’s been delayed in really competing on the same level as the social media behemoths. With the ability to draft and schedule posts, these updates represent a major step toward making Threads feel less like a ghost town, and more like it lives up to its name as a place to be creative and share smart.

Empowering Content Creators

What’s key here is that Threads offers users a little more control to craft content, then freezes it, so users have the tools to draft and schedule more confidently, and engage with content creation to the full extent of their creative abilities.

A Response to User Feedback

Instagram’s careful calibration and expansion of Threads is nothing so systematic as Surplus Labour, but simply a responsive and deliberate market strategy. From an organisational perspective, the firm is communicating a semantic message about the shape and elasticity of the market in social media and messaging apps.

SETTING THE STAGE FOR FUTURE INNOVATIONS

With Threads, I’m eager to see how these (and other) interesting features will evolve as the company continues to test and iterate. We’re only at the outset of what might be a promising thread of the future of social media.

LOOKING AHEAD: THE ADVANCE OF THREADS

In fact, that kind of feature – multiple drafts and the ability to schedule posts – is indicative not of the limitations of Threads, but of its ambitions: of how the app hopes to evolve and reinvent the very practice of social exchange and sharing of content, at the conceptual and experiential level. It is intended to make Threads a better experience, to nurture creativity, and to place more control in the hands of users by harking back to the richness of expression that is natural to human beings.

UNDERSTANDING "ADVANCE" IN THREADS' CONTEXT

The seemingly innocuous word ‘advance’ refers to the specific (and deliberate) updates and development of Threads to enable it to better compete in the social media marketplace of potential users. Through incorporating user needs and keeping pace with industry trends, the product advances its position in the social media marketplace by giving the user the tools to enabling creativity, strategic sharing and, ultimately, user satisfaction. This journey of advancement can be described in terms of numerous changes brought about by iteration and user feedback, all within a flexible vision of what it means to ‘progress’ for the sake of success.

Ultimately, draft-testing multiple versions and Threads’ forthcoming post scheduling feature all represent a key moment in that evolution – offering users solutions to an immediate problem but also planting seeds for a future in which social media interactions hinge on creativity, control, and planned, purposeful sharing. As Threads strives to open up new avenues of expressive potential and communal practices, its users will no doubt go along for the ride.