Meta’s head of Threads shares advice about how and when to post — as the debate swirls around engagement bait

Meta executives don’t want to “encourage” news on Threads, but this weekend proved it can thrive there.

Meta has been taking heat for engagement-bait posts on Threads, but the company is sticking by comments — and the idea of posts that “drive conversation” — as a way to decide what should get recommended.

If you haven’t been on Threads following the saga, here’s a quick recap.

Last month, B-17 experimented with posting rage-bait content on Threads and found that posts that prompted people to get angry in her comments often performed very well on the app.

Since then, Threads has been full of debates around rage bait, content moderation, and political content on the Twitter-like platform.

Last week, head of Instagram Adam Mosseri — who also oversees Threads — wrote in a Threads post that Meta knows there has been an increase in engagement bait Threads and that it was “working to get it under control.” Then on Friday, Mosseri posted that Threads “found mistakes” in its content moderation enforcement.

The debate has come as Threads has continued to pick up steam among users. Threads, which is just over a year old, had more than 230 million global monthly active users in September, the marketing intelligence firm Sensor Tower estimated. The last official figure, which Mosseri shared in August, was that Threads had surpassed 200 million monthly users. For comparison, Sensor Tower estimated that X (formerly Twitter) had over 315 million global MAUs as of September.

B-17 spoke with Emily Dalton Smith, a VP of product management at Meta and head of Threads, about its latest recommendations for creators using the app — and the path ahead.

If there’s one takeaway that Dalton Smith has for creators using Threads, it’s that they should remember it’s “a real-time conversation app.”

“Most of the content will be distributed in just a few hours over the course of the day,” Dalton Smith told B-17. “Making sure that you’re talking about things that are happening now and that are really timely and relevant will go a long way.”

Here are five takeaways from B-17 conversation with Meta’s Emily Dalton Smith:

• Engagement = comments (for better or worse). Thread posts that “drive conversations are more likely to get recommended,” the company is telling creators. Dalton Smith told B-17 that Meta sees conversation as replies happening on a post. She recommends that creators reply to their audience, other creators, and regular users “to make sure that their posts are getting a lot of attention and activity.”

• Don’t expect DMs on Threads anytime soon. “We don’t have any plans to offer native messaging in Threads right now,” Dalton Smith said. “But looking ahead, we’re exploring some ways to make it easier for people to connect and find their people.” The app does let people use Instagram DMs to share content, though.

• Labeling content as AI-generated won’t hurt distribution. While on the phone with Dalton Smith, the first post on my own Threads feed was an AI-generated video of cats walking down a fashion runway — but I didn’t see an AI label. Dalton Smith said that Meta encourages people to use these tags and that “it won’t change your distribution.”

• Meta is still in testing mode when it comes to monetization. While Threads began rolling out a limited test of creator monetization this year, the platform is still not “doing anything on ads at this time,” Dalton Smith said. “We’re thinking a lot about how we support creators over the long term, but right now we’re just really focused on building out the app itself.”

• Also, weekends are apparently a great time to post. “We do find that content posted on the weekends may help drive higher engagement, which makes sense because Threads is such a real-time app,” Dalton Smith said. Meta recommends that creators post between two and five times a week, too. Frequent posting to Threads is linked to higher impressions per post, Meta said.