Meta Planning ‘Hooks’ to Retain more than Half Users that are Becoming Inactive

USA, 28th July 2023: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told staff on Thursday that Meta Platforms executives are focusing intensively on increasing retention on their new Twitter rival Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its buzzy launch.

The text-based app’s user retention was better than projected, even though it was “not perfect,” according to Zuckerberg, who spoke at an internal company town hall, as reported by Reuters who obtained an audio from the meet.

He said, “Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet.”

Zuckerberg called the drop-off “normal” and predicted that retention will increase as the firm added more features to the app, including a desktop version and search tools.

Meta is considering adding new “retention-driving hooks” to lure users to return to the service, such as “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads,” according to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

The CEOs’ comments came a day after Meta surprised investors with an optimistic revenue growth prediction, a sign of a return for a company that faced significant scepticism last year as ad sales plunged due to its substantial investment on the metaverse.

On Thursday, Meta’s stock rose 8% as a result of the news.

On the conference call, Zuckerberg told staff that the company’s work on the artificial intelligence and virtual reality technologies that will power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.”

Given their years of experience designing operating systems for existing goods, Meta, he added, needed to start investing in that work ahead of competitors such as Apple, Google, and Microsoft.

This month, the business released an artificial intelligence model called Llama 2, which it made freely available for commercial use to any developer whose services had fewer than 700 million users, according to Zuckerberg and Cox. According to Cox, the model has gotten over 150,000 download requests in the week since its publication.

In response to a query on the potential “cage match” with Elon Musk, Zuckerberg stated that he was “not sure if it’s going to come together.”