Is Threads good for business in 2026? What 500 million users mean for B2B

Big enough to stop treating it as an experiment. Threads went from 175 million monthly active users in mid-2024 to 400 million in August 2025, and Meta announced 500 million in June 2026.

Usage is lighter than on X. Third-party estimates put daily time on Threads at around 5 minutes, against roughly 34 on X. People check in rather than live there. That shapes how you should use it: short messages, and replies answered fast.

Threads pulled a mix that's very useful for selling services and software to small and mid-sized businesses.

• Founders and operators who got tired of X, often in SaaS and AI.
• Agency owners building an audience early on a channel that isn't saturated.
• Coaches, consultants and creators who came over from Instagram.
• Marketers and growth leads testing the newest channel for their brands.
• Consumer brands and local businesses cross-posting from Instagram.

It's not just Instagram with text. Meta says more than a third of daily Threads users with connections follow mostly different accounts on Threads than on Instagram. So the people you reach there aren't simply your Instagram audience again.

Meta also credited communities, spaces where people gather around a topic, with part of the growth to 500 million. For you, that's a shortcut. A community about running an agency, growing a store or building with AI is a ready-made gathering of the people you sell to, and the people posting and replying in it are telling you what they struggle with in their own words.

• Strong fit: agencies, coaches, consultants, creator tools, SaaS sold to founders and marketers, DTC brands.
• Decent fit: B2B services sold to small businesses, recruiters, local businesses with a personal brand.
• Weak fit: enterprise software with long procurement, deeply technical infra sold to engineers (X is still deeper there), regulated industries.

The simple test: search Threads for 3 phrases your buyer uses about their own problem. Open the posts with the most replies and read the first 20. If most of them sound like people you'd sell to, Threads is a channel for you.

Both, but in different ways. Posting builds brand slowly. Threads' algorithm leans heavily on replies, so a post that sparks conversation travels, and a profile with good posts makes every DM you send more credible.

Lead generation comes from conversations. Since September 2025 you can DM people who don't follow you. Those messages land in Message Requests, with links and media switched off, and Meta caps how many requests an account can send. That sounds limiting. In practice it keeps the channel clean, and people haven't yet built the reflex to ignore every request the way they have on X or LinkedIn.

Short, specific, about them, ending with a question they can answer in 5 words. More in what to DM on Threads. On an app people open for 5 minutes, that's the only kind of message that gets read.

It helps, but you don't need a content team. When someone gets your DM request, they tap your profile. An empty account kills the reply. A profile with a clear bio and a handful of useful posts makes answering easy.

• Post 2 or 3 times a week. Short takes on the problems your buyers have.
• Reply to people in your niche every day. Replies are the strongest signal on Threads.
• Cross-post your best LinkedIn or Instagram ideas in a shorter, looser form.

1. 1Days 1 to 2: tidy the profile and publish 3 posts about the problem you solve. The full version is our 14-day plan to get clients on Threads.
2. 2Days 2 to 3: find 5 accounts your buyers follow and 10 posts where your buyers replied. Collect 100 people, with the reason for each.
3. 3Days 3 to 10: each day, like and reply to the posts of 15 to 20 of them, then DM the ones you engaged with the day before.
4. 4Days 3 to 14: answer every reply within the hour. Follow up once or twice with anyone who goes quiet.
5. 5Day 14: count replies and calls booked per source. If 5% or more of people replied and a few calls are booked, keep going and scale.

Run the same message on another channel at the same time if you want a fair comparison, the way we lay out in Threads vs X for B2B. The answer for most teams selling to founders and creators is "both", with different people on each.