Threads and the Volatility of Social Media

When Threads hit the market in 2023, the digital world turned to look at it almost overnight. Millions of people signed up within hours and, for a moment, it seemed there was a new must-be place to be. But the excitement also left an uncomfortable question for any business that lives off its online presence: what happens to your audience when the platform where you built it changes the rules, loses relevance, or simply stops working the way you expected?

That back-and-forth is nothing new. Every so often a network appears promising to be the future, while others that seemed indestructible lose reach without warning. For a small business in Mexico, this volatility isn’t a curious tech fact: it’s a real business risk. If your customers, your orders, and your conversation history live only inside an app you don’t control, your operation depends on decisions made somewhere else in the world.

Rented land: why it matters

Social networks are extraordinary for getting your name out there, but they’re rented land. You provide the effort, the content, and the community; the platform sets the rules, and it can change them whenever it wants. Overnight, the algorithm is modified, organic reach drops, ad prices are adjusted, or a new app appears that takes everyone’s attention.

None of this means you should abandon social media. It means it shouldn’t be your only foundation. The difference between a business that withstands these changes and one that suffers every time “something changed on the platform” lies in where the relationship with its customers truly lives.

Social media is for attracting; your own system is for keeping.

What you can control

The good news is that there are digital assets that do belong to you and that no network can take away. It’s worth investing there, because they’re what sustains your business over the long term:

• Your customer base. Names, contacts, purchase history, and preferences saved in a system of your own, not trapped in an app’s message inbox.
• Your website and your own channels. A space you manage, where you set the rules and the content doesn’t disappear because of an algorithm change.
• Your internal processes. The way you serve, quote, and follow up, organized in tools built to fit you and not improvised network by network.
• Your history and your data. The information that lets you make decisions based on facts and not guesses, available when you need it.

What this looks like in practice

Imagine a business that receives all its orders through messages on various networks. As long as everything flows, it seems convenient. But the day a platform fails, changes its policy, or loses users, that business is left with no way to contact its own people, because it never saved that information somewhere of its own.

Now imagine the same business with its own system: every customer who arrives through social media is recorded, every conversation has follow-up, and every sale feeds a history you can consult. The networks remain the storefront, but the store, the filing cabinet, and the register are at home. When the wind shifts—and on social media it always does—the operation doesn’t stop.

How to start building on your own land

You don’t need a giant platform or to migrate everything at once. The key is to start with something small and well defined, and grow on what works:

• Rescue your information today. Gather the contacts and customer data that today are scattered across your networks and move them to a place that’s yours.
• Define one process at a time. Choose the flow that hurts most (for example, prospect follow-up) and organize it first; then move to the next.
• Use social media to attract, not to store. Let it be the front door, but keep the relationship and the history in a system built to fit you.
• Measure what matters. With your data in order, you’ll be able to make decisions with reliable information, not at the pace of someone else’s updates.

The volatility of social media will still be there: new apps will arrive, others will lose steam, and the rules will change again and again. Your best defense isn’t guessing which one will win next, but building on your own land. If you want to turn that scattered social media presence into a system built to fit you—one where your customers, your conversations, and your history are safe no matter what happens outside—at Normandia Web we can design it with you and start with the first step.