Few things unite us more than a football weekend on Twitter. Everyone is passionately arguing about a game but we are united in our love for football. Football Twitter is a large, mostly dysfunctional, regularly hilarious family. There are times it is almost as entertaining as the actual games. That is one of the reasons, but far from the only reason, the possibility of the failure of Twitter concerned so many in our profession.
I still have a difficult time believing a smart man like Elon Musk would spend $44 Billion on a product to completely fly it into the side of a mountain. Even though his rockets have exploded, he’s never abandoned his pursuit of space travel, surely smoothly running Twitter is significantly easier than achieving low Earth orbit. The “Rate Limit Exceeded” fiasco opened the door for competition and Meta may have kicked the door off the hinges.
Let me first say, regardless of what Elon Musk’s lawsuit might claim, Threads is not Twitter, not even close. Meta’s answer to Twitter has a long way to go before finding the popularity Musk’s platform once enjoyed. They do have a chance to get it right but they are going to have to copy many things Twitter does to make it the most useful for the sports talk industry.
First, it must offer the option of presenting Threads in chronological order. Second, it must have a function that only presents Threads from accounts I follow. Few things about Twitter frustrate me more than opening the app and seeing 22 hour old tweets from accounts I don’t follow. I have no problem with the existence of a “For You” function, I use it all the time on TikTok, I just want the option to permanently bypass it on Twitter.
Also, yes, I am in my late 40’s and use TikTok, I’ll not accept your slander and judgment.
I remember the early days of me doing a sports show. I was forced to spend the hours leading up to my show surfing around on sites like The Big Lead, Deadspin, Sports By Brooks, The Wizard of Odds and so many more. Those sites were invaluable because they served as a clearing house for all the major sports stories of the day, this was before the word “aggregation” was a major part of the sports media vocabulary.
Along came Twitter and everything changed. Almost at once, all the major stories in the world were collected in one single spot. No longer did I have to bounce around the internet and find the stories to build a show around, Twitter did that for me.
It also became the breaking news wire we depended on during shows. Often before ESPN could even build the “Breaking News” graphic, someone on Twitter had already broken the story. Eventually, even the major ESPN news breakers shared their scoop on Twitter before it ever even hit ESPN.
What would the sports talk world do without Twitter? As an industry, we have become heavily reliant on that one social media platform to help us do our daily job. For some, it has even become the primary distribution platform for their written or video product. While I was quick to jump right in and make jokes about my rate limit being exceeded, the truth is, it isn’t a joking matter. Can Threads become that for our industry? Only time will tell, but I do think it has that potential.
The question becomes more about how our industry uses Threads to communicate with the public. My show, The Next Round, is solely distributed on digital platforms. It has forced us to think long and hard about what we do with every social media platform. One strategy we follow is to never put the same exact thing on every platform.
If you stop to consider the thought process each follower uses to choose how they consume our shows, this makes perfect sense. If a show, or outlet, is active on Twitter, Threads, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok, what good does it do to place the same exact content on each? Why do I need to follow all five accounts if I get the same thing on all of them? Furthermore, knowing I am missing content might spur me to adopt a new social media platform just to get that content.
You now have a chance to do it your way with Threads. What is your show missing that Threads could provide? Can you make it your exclusive social media home for comments and discussions? Can it be the marriage of the visual of Instagram and the written word of Twitter you have needed?
Only you can answer that question but now is the rare chance to adopt a brand new social media platform and do it the way you want from day one. Diversification is always a smart plan, you never know the day your rate limit might be eternally exceeded.
Ryan Brown is a columnist for Barrett Sports Media, and a co-host of the popular sports audio/video show ‘The Next Round’ formerly known as JOX Roundtable, which previously aired on WJOX in Birmingham. You can find him on Twitter @RyanBrownLive and follow his show @NextRoundLive.
