Grocers try to thread the needle on the latest social media app

Hi. I’m Heather Lalley, a.k.a Threads user #849,078.

As an Extremely Online™ human, I was one of the first million folks to sign up for Threads Wednesday night. That’s the new social media app from Meta (the company behind Instagram and Facebook) that’s being dubbed a “Twitter killer.” It had more than 30 million sign ups as of Thursday morning, according to a post from founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Twitter has been plagued with, let’s call them “user discomforts,” since Tesla owner Elon Musk acquired the platform for $44 billion last October, and many have looked for and even created alternatives. (I’m looking at you, Bluesky and Mastodon and Post.News.)

Threads’ interface is very much like Twitter’s, with infinite scrolling potential of posts of up to 500 characters (plus links, photos and videos) from regular people, celebrities and, of course, brands, retailers and other companies.

Extremely early Threads adopters among grocers Wednesday included Kroger (only post so far, “We love a fresh new app), Walmart, Hy-Vee, H-E-B and Target (zero posts as of Thursday afternoon), and the relatively prolific Aldi, which kicked things off with “Where our day one ALDI fans at?” which has drawn nearly 150 replies and more than 800 likes.

Digital-first retailers like Instacart, perhaps unsurprisingly, haven taken aggressively to the new platform, posting more than two dozen times to Threads in the last 24 hours.

Instacart posted frequently on Threads during its first day. / Screenshot

I’m old enough (and online enough) to remember when Twitter was a baby, and Wednesday night’s “hey, is this thing on” vibe of Threads very closely mimicked that innocent, free-association Twitter feel.

Whether Threads will stay that way or whether it will even gain traction remains to be seen. But this much is clear: Grocers, for the most part, don’t do much with social media, whether it’s Facebook or TikTok or the hottest new app. And there’s so much opportunity there for customer engagement, brand building, traffic boosting and more.

Food retailers are increasingly being told to think like restaurants. And after covering that industry for many years before moving to grocery, I can say with confidence that restaurants are succeeding with this type of marketing. Time and again, we’ve seen restaurant chains have hits with limited-time offers thanks to in-house social media efforts and those that have gone viral among diners.

Yes, it takes time and creativity and, for the big retailers, a social media team. But it’s probably worth paying attention to a platform that attracted the eyeballs of 30 million grocery buyers in one day.

We’re just getting started like everybody else, but you can find Winsight Grocery Business on Threads at winsight_grocery. (Or search for our name on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.)