Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, has announced some changes coming to the platform. His post reads:
Some Threads updates today to help manage your presence on the app: You can now schedule posts on Threads, and metrics for individual posts are rolling out in Insights. We’re also adding the ability to “markup” a post that you’re resharing so you can add your creative take, starting with a few countries with more to come soon. More to come soon.
For context, Insights is a feature that helps users understand their reach, engagement, and audience demographics. Individual post metrics were initially announced last month (they were in testing) and are now rolling out.
As for marking up a post, we have an idea of what that feature may look like, thanks to the work of sleuths like Chris Messina. A few days before Mosseri's post, Messina pointed out that Threads was adding the ability to markup other people's content. He noted that a squiggle icon appears to the right of the location pin, and tapping it brings up a Markup UI.
Marking up posts can be useful if you want to draw attention to parts of a post before sharing. Based on the available screenshots, a highlighter, arrow tool, and red marker are available as markup tools.
Threads has been adding new updates to the platform. Some of these features are borrowed from competing platforms like Bluesky's starter packs and Stories on X (essentially AI-powered summaries of trending topics on X).
The platform saw immense growth last year, reaching over 175 million monthly active users (MAU) by July and hitting over 15 million sign-ups in November. Some of the people who've switched to Threads are X refugees who left in protest of Elon Musk's policies on X, such as training Grok on user posts.
