As Threads continues to grow, and has seemingly seen an uptick in interest over the past week, Meta has announced a range of new features for the app, which bring it more into line with other social platforms on analytics, post creation, and more.

First off, as we reported earlier in the week, Threads analytics has arrived, with desktop users now able to access a display of key performance metrics for their account.

As you can see in these example screens, Threads’ new analytics display includes:

View counts
Interaction insights
Overall Like, Reply, Repost and Quote counts
A follower growth chart
Audience demographics

This will be hugely helpful for marketers and creators who are looking to grow their Threads audience, while it’ll also help in influencer marketing arrangements, by enabling creators to pitch their specific audience reach.

In addition to this, Threads is also rolling out post scheduling, so you can better manage your Threads presence.

As per Meta:

“Content planning helps creators and businesses maintain a consistent online presence. Our new scheduling feature will help with this process by allowing you to create Threads posts and schedule them to publish at a later date and time. You can schedule multiple posts a day, multiple days in advance.”

Of course, you’ve been able to schedule Threads posts in selected third party apps since June, when Threads launched the latest version of its API, so it’s not an entirely new addition, as such. But native scheduling will make it easier to plan out your content, directly within the Threads desktop app.

Threads is also adding post drafts, another planning element.

Threads initially added a basic post drafts option back in March, but that only allowed for one draft at a time. But now, you save up to 100 ideas, for as long as you want, and have them accessible for posting at any time.

Threads continues to add relevant, valuable features, reflecting Meta’s commitment to the app, which is now up to 200 million monthly active users. Which is still a long way off X, which has 250 million daily actives. But even so, over time, Threads is becoming a more active hub of conversation, within certain circles at least, which could set it up for ongoing, enduring success.

Will it become the Twitter alternative that Meta hopes? Its growth rate has slowed since its record-breaking initial rise, but the data also shows that Threads is gaining more and more momentum over time, as more communities shift over to the app.

I’m still not convinced that Meta’s anti-political news stance will work in its favor on a real-time app. But despite this, Threads does seem to be improving its real-time content alerts over time.

And clearly, many users are seeking an alternative to X.

And really, at the end of the day, Threads only needs to win over a relatively minor amount of X users to be relevant, because all of the content on X is generated by 20% of its audience. 80% of X users use the app in “read only” mode, never posting themselves or engaging in any way.

That means that of X’s 250 million daily actives, Threads only really needs to target those 50 million active posters to steal attention.

And at least some portion of them are already seeking alternatives, so if Threads can get its offering right, including monetization, the battle for real-time engagement may not be as significant as it seems.