Why Meta's head of Threads thinks it's great if users move to DMs and 'lurk' in the feed

Meta is adding a new way to slide into someone’s DMs.

The company is opening up messaging for Threads users on the web starting on Tuesday.

The feature, which first rolled out on mobile in July, is targeted at power users who tend to log on to the platform from their computers, Connor Hayes, Meta’s head of Threads, told Business Insider. It allows you to directly message mutuals — people who follow you back — and participate in group chats of up to 50 people.

DMs are on the rise on Threads. The company said users send around 350 million a week, and weekly messaging grew 30% from the start of the year on a per-user basis.

The company’s push into messaging comes at a moment when more and more users are shifting from public posting to private group chats.

Some people “don’t actually want to be publicly talking about things, but they do have something to say,” Hayes said.

Instead, they’re sharing those thoughts directly with friends.

Beyond offering privacy, messaging is also a great way to keep people logging on to Threads.

“If you weren’t going to open Threads today, but I chose to send you something over DMs, and now you open the app to see that content because you trust me and you know that I’m going to send you some good stuff, that’s purely incremental to the system,” Hayes said.

Sharing content in DMs makes people “more engaged with the app overall,” he said.

That’s also the case on Instagram, Hayes added. In Instagram DMs, for instance, if someone sends you a reel and you continue to scroll, the app feeds you more recommended content without ever leaving your inbox.

Hayes said Threads hasn’t built a similar feature for its DMs yet, “but that’s the type of thing that I could imagine us doing in the future.”

Messaging is a win-win.

“If we end up with a large percentage of the users that are lurking in the feed and chatting in the DMs … that’s actually my expectation, I think that’s totally great,” he said.

The company can also bolster its recommendations to users based on the posts they click on in their DMs.

While sending a DM is free on Threads and Instagram, messaging is a growing business for Meta on WhatsApp, where paid business messaging was a primary driver of the company’s $885 million in non-advertising revenue last quarter.

Threads wants to come out on top

Threads spun out of Instagram nearly three years ago and quickly grew into a top rival to X (formerly Twitter) and smaller players like BlueSky and Mastodon. The platform’s growth — it crossed 400 million monthly active users last year — was bolstered by its relationship to Instagram, which frequently promotes Threads in its app.

“We assumed that in the initial stages of growth, we were going to have to go much more into head-to-head competition with the other apps that were operating in the space,” Hayes said.

Meta has been “pleasantly surprised” by how many users “have been willing to give Threads a shot,” Hayes added.

Threads, meanwhile, has high ambitions for growth.

“We’re a smaller team, we’re kind of in a growth stage as an app, we’re not yet the overall leader in our category,” Hayes said. There’s still room to grow in terms of its cultural relevance, he added.

The platform is hiring a VP of product to “help us think through how to win in this space,” Hayes said. The VP will report to Hayes, who reports to Instagram’s top executive, Adam Mosseri.

“Becoming a leader in the US is probably the top line thing that we’re going to be focused on,” Hayes said.