Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that Meta is putting a lot of effort into keeping people on their new Twitter competitor, Threads. This is because the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks after it made a big splash.
The number of people who kept using the text-based app was better than what executives had thought, but it was “not perfect,” said Zuckerberg at an internal company town hall, which Reuters listened to.
Zuckerberg said that he thought the drop-off was “normal” and that he thought retention would go up as the company added more features to the app, such as a PC version and the ability to search.
READ: Threads Just Lost 50% of Active Users
Meta is thinking about adding more “retention-driving hooks” to get users to come back to the app, like “making sure that people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.
A company representative didn’t want to say anything about the meeting.
The executives’ comments came a day after Meta wowed investors with a prediction of strong revenue growth. This was a sign of a comeback for a company that was heavily criticized last year for spending a lot on the metaverse while ad sales dropped.
Thursday, Meta’s stock went up by 8% after the news came out.
Zuckerberg told the employees on the call that he thought the company’s work on the augmented and virtual reality technology that would power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.”
He also said that Meta needs to start investing in this work before competitors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, who have spent years making operating systems for their own products.
Zuckerberg and Cox also talked about how this month, the company released an AI model called Llama 2 and made it free for any developer whose service has fewer than 700 million users to use for business purposes.
READ: Meta Launches ChatGPT Rival Llama
Cox said that since the model came out a week ago, more than 150,000 people have asked to download it.
