Who Is Threads For? Meta Would Like One Answer to Be ‘Podcasters’

Threads is one of the two big platforms that materialized in 2023 as alternatives to X/Twitter when Elon Musk really started remaking it in his own image. Bluesky developed an unmistakable identity as the microblogging platform where liberals talk about liberal stuff, while Threads became the microblogging platform built atop Instagram, where Instagram users talk about themselves.

Now, Threads’ parent company Meta is making a concerted effort to nail down some semblance of a specific audience: podcasters and podcast fans.

As reported by Engadget, Threads announced a suite of podcast-friendly features on Tuesday, rolling out slowly (the timeline is unclear) with some of the functions debuting immediately—particularly for podcasts that live on Spotify. To start, podcasters can now put a big, graphical link to their podcasts in their bio that looks, integrated and official, including the title of the latest episode.

Also, that famous problem where microblogging platforms tend to be bad at scraping data from podcast feeds for posts, and typically don’t generate elegant, clickable preview “cards” is more or less solved now. When podcasters inevitably post their latest episodes—again, if they’re on Spotify—they’ll get pleasant, visually legible buttons with the word “PODCAST” right on them, so there’ll be no more confusion.

Adam Mosseri, the CEO and President of Instagram, wrote on Threads that he’s “excited about this, there is lots more to do to support podcasts here on Threads.” For starters, it will need these features to support Apple Podcasts, instead of just Spotify, if Threads is going to really transform into the social media home of the podcasting universe, though Engadget says that support is in the works.   

But as Joseph Bernstein of the New York Times style section wrote back in July, the appeal of podcasts as a social media phenomenon isn’t just the ability to share episodes clearly and easily. “Clips of video podcasts slot neatly into the Gen Z and millennial behemoths of TikTok and Instagram.”

“To get a sense of just how much things have changed, imagine the viral podcast appearances of the 2024 presidential campaign — Donald J. Trump on Theo Von’s podcast and Kamala Harris on “Call Her Daddy” — happening without YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. You can’t,” Bernstein wrote.

In my experience, viral podcast clips show up as context-free content, wandering around social media without necessarily getting linked back to the creator, or even crediting them. Harnessing that virality for clicks and followers is a tough trick for creators to pull off. Figuring out a solution to that problem could make Threads the truly hospitable environment for podcasters it seems to want to be.