After it was spotted in initial testing last week, Threads has now officially launched its new text expansion option, which will enable users to attach an additional, in-stream text note of up to 10k words to your Threads updates.
As you can see in these example screens, Threads’ longer text attachment option, accessible via a new icon in the post composer, will take you through to a blog-style editor to create an additional text note. That separate text note will then be added to your post, and will be accessible to Threads viewers via a “Read more” prompt.
As explained by Threads:
“There are many ways to share your perspective on Threads, but we’ve noticed people expressing themselves with screenshots of longer content from books, articles, newsletters, podcast transcripts, and more when 500 characters isn’t enough. To address this, we’re rolling out a way to attach up to 10,000 characters of text to a post. Any attached text can be read directly in Threads to help you convey more complex perspectives, draw your audience in, and promote your work.”
Which is more like a blog post than a thread. In fact, the addition of longer text updates negates the concept of “threads” entirely, but that’s just being pedantic about the name.
In addition to this, Threads is also looking to make it easier to link to other sources from these additions:
“If you’re sharing or previewing content from other platforms on Threads, you can include a link to the full content in the body of your main post.”
Which is pretty much the opposite of X’s longer posting option, which is available to X Premium subscribers. X’s text expansion composer, which enables users to post text attachments up to an additional 25k characters, is designed to avoid off-platform links entirely, by prompting authors to post their full articles to the app.
Threads is seemingly looking to encourage external linking, while Threads has also noted several times that it doesn’t penalize the reach of posts with links, unlike other platforms.
As such, this new posting option could be another way to encourage broader discussion within the app, and drive more traffic back to your content. Which could be a good way to help bloggers and writers build their audience, both on and off platform, through expanded context to generate interest.
It’s an interesting addition, which could hold a lot of potential, depending on how Threads users adapt to it and adopt it. We don’t have any data on the performance of longer updates on X, so we don’t have a direct comparison. But if Threads users warm to these updates, that could help to drive all new user behaviors, while also giving the Threads algorithm more data to go on in relation to individual user preferences and interests.
It all depends on how the Threads audience responds, and how these longer text attachments drive behaviors. But it’s definitely a more valuable approach to such than text screenshots (which the Threads algorithm can’t read), which could have significant benefits.
The new longer text option is being rolled out to all users in the latest version of the app.
