5 Things Corporate Learning Can Learn from the Epic Success of Threads

It’s been two weeks since I downloaded Threads, and instantly became a Daily Active User. Since then over 150 million people have joined Meta’s text-based social network, making it one of the most remarkable app launches in history — and the fastest ever to reach 100 million users. It achieved this feat in only 5 days, compared to the 2 months it took generative AI phenomenon ChatGPT and the 9 months it took social media giant TikTok do reach the same user base.

This kind of rapid adoption is the dream for many learning leaders when they roll out new technologies. Adoption and engagement remains one of the largest challenges in the industry, with average adoption rates of learning technology at 15–20 % and active engagement rates of 2–5 % for an enterprise audience. That’s not great ROI.

So what can we learn from the epic adoption success of Threads? What made people happily sign up and join in the millions, while you struggle to whip a dozen of middle managers into clicking their way through your LMS?

1. Real and Influential People Matter

We are social creatures and our connection with other humans matters. We’re biologically hardwired to listen to people of influence, trust authority, and find out what’s happening in the community around us. All of this drives us to join Threads to know what’s going on and what influential people around us are saying. There is no such innate curiosity around the long-form videos from stuffy brands and academic institutions in your LMS.

2. Back-and-forth Interaction is King

The way we develop the best ideas and get to the most nuanced reflective thinking is through back-and-forth interaction with others. Back-and-forth interaction also makes us feel included in the conversation, heard and seen. We feel a sense of contribution and participation, which in turn drives engagement.

The one-way shoving-content-down-everyones-throats-approach of your learning system does not do this. Rather the opposite — it tells your learners to just consume and complete in order for your completion rates to look good — do not engage, participate or contribute. This turns their ownership and sense of inclusion off.

3. Bite-sized, Quick and Mobile is How People Want to Consume Content and Interact

Add to this the ease of downloading and setting up a Threads account. 3 clicks and you’re in. And you stay logged in. No need to click 17 times through your intranet to reach something or interact with someone. Just pick up your phone (as we do 144 times per day) and open it.

4. Get the Leaders Involved

The amount of times I saw Adam Mosseri or Mark Zuckerberg get involved in a random conversation with anyone and everyone in the first week was off the charts. It seemed to me they were replying to a large majority of all the threads in my feed! This goes to show, again and again, that there is nothing more effective than dogfooding and leaders leading by example — all the way up to Mosseri and Zuck levels.

When planning your internal communications and launch campaigns around your new learning technology, never underestimate the power of pre-building a champion network of leaders and super users who can show how it’s done and kick off the FOMO.

5. Leverage Your Existing Network Data to Build in Social Virality from Start

You may not have a readily available Instagram user base of 2.35 billion people to tap on for quick social adoption, but you do have an existing employee base who are connected to many of your existing enterprise systems.

Just like Threads created pre-existing followers from your Instagram base, meaning you already had followers when you created your account, you can create large parts of the social graph, learning cohorts and following through the data available in your HRIS and Microsoft Graph (if you’re a Microsoft shop) before launch. If your HRIS data is clean and up-to-date, an active directory sync extension would suffice for drumming up the virality 101 within your organization.

People starting out in the right community, with the right content, with the right people around them will make a world of difference in how relevant they determine the platform to be for them. And that determination is what will make up your adoption rates.