Meta Develops Strategies to Keep Users Engaged as Over Half of Users Exit App

CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed employees on Thursday that Meta Platforms executives are prioritizing efforts to increase user retention on their recently launched Twitter competitor, Threads. This comes in response to the app experiencing a significant decline in its user base, losing over 50% of its users in the weeks following its highly anticipated release.

User retention for the text-based app was better than executives expected, though it was “not perfect,” Zuckerberg said during an internal company town hall, audio recorded by Reuters.

“Obviously if you have over 100 million people signing up, ideally it would be great if all of them or even half of them stayed. We’re not there yet,” he said.

Zuckerberg said he considered the drop “normal” and expected retention to increase as the company adds new features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality.

Meta plans to add “retention hooks” to entice users to return to the app, such as “making sure people on the Instagram app see important threads,” said Chief Product Officer Chris Cox.

The company’s spokesperson declined to comment on the meeting.

The executives’ comments came a day after Meta surprised investors with a rosy revenue growth forecast, marking a comeback for a company that faced deep skepticism over its heavy spending on the metaverse last year as ad sales slumped.

As a result of the announcement, Meta’s shares rose 8% on Thursday.

During the call, Zuckerberg told employees that he believed the company’s work on augmented and virtual reality technology to power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.”

He added that Meta had to start investing in this work before competitors like Apple, Google and Microsoft because of their years of experience building operating systems for existing products.

“That way we’ll have all the tools ready when this is ready for prime time,” he said, predicting mass adoption of metaverse technologies in the 2030s.

Zuckerberg and Cox also highlighted an AI model the company released this month called Llama 2, which it made freely available for commercial use to all developers whose services had fewer than 700 million users.

The model has received more than 150,000 download requests in the week since its release, Cox said.

When asked about a proposed “cage match” against Elon Musk, Zuckerberg said he’s “not sure if it’s going to come together.”