Two years of Threads: Why financial services must rethink reputation strategy

Jack Richards, Global Head of Integrated and Field Marketing at Onclusive, explores the future of Meta’s X competitor, Threads.

When Threads launched two years ago, it promised to reshape how businesses engage with their audiences online. Today, the platform exemplifies a more profound shift: the fragmentation of digital influence itself. Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon each reflect this diversification, with audiences splintering along cultural, political, and behavioural lines. Trust is no longer a ‘given’ on a platform where audiences are sceptical, highly selective, and quick to disengage if they perceive risk. For financial services firms, this presents a double-ended challenge: they must both navigate mounting regulatory pressures, and build reputation on platforms where trust is increasingly fragile.

Recent analysis reveals a further disconnect: whilst customer service access dominates nearly 20% of banking conversations, AI chatbots account for just 3.2% of innovation discussions despite heavy investment from financial institutions. Reputation, it turns out, is built less through technology deployment and more through understanding where and how audiences actually engage.

Navigating trust and accountability on social platforms

One of the most pressing challenges is the rapid erosion of trust in social platforms themselves. In the UK, just 14% of consumers believe social media companies are doing enough to moderate harmful content, according to the Reuters Institute. Public scepticism is growing, not just towards what brands say online, but the platforms delivering the message. This puts brands in a difficult position. They’re expected to stay active on social media, but the platforms themselves may not be seen as trustworthy or safe.

Meta’s decision to end third-party fact-checking in the United States from March 2025 has further complicated this, prompting conversation from some around accountability. If this decision were applied to the EU, it would violate the Digital Services Act, which imposes obligations on online platforms to counter disinformation, yet the precedent set in the US market creates uncertainty about future approaches to content verification.

Without robust mechanisms to combat disinformation, like comprehensive social listening, brands face greater risk when engaging online. With platforms pulling back on content verification, it’s up to businesses to ensure accuracy, as false narratives about products or practices can spread more easily in the absence of fact-checking.

Tailoring strategy to platform cultures

Each platform now operates within its own cultural ecosystem. Threads skews towards curated, community-driven engagement; X remains a hub for breaking news and polarised debate; TikTok rewards authenticity and algorithmic discovery; Bluesky and others cater to highly specific subcultures.

The move to platforms such as Threads, Bluesky and Mastodon has been especially common among brands that rely heavily on public trust. Companies have cited concerns about their content appearing alongside controversial or harmful material, leading to strategic pivots towards platforms perceived as offering greater brand safety. However, this migration isn’t simply about abandoning certain channels, it’s about recognising that each platform serves different strategic purposes and audiences.

Audiences don’t behave the same across platforms and neither should brands. What resonates on one channel may fall flat, or backfire, on another. A witty, real-time response that shines on X might feel off on LinkedIn’s professional environment, whilst polished corporate content that works on LinkedIn could appear inauthentic on TikTok. Effective reputation management demands platform-specific content and engagement strategies.

Listen to the digital noise

Effective monitoring now rests on four key pillars that work together to provide comprehensive reputation oversight. From Axa to the United States Postal Service, social listening is bridging the gap between brands and consumers.

Credible source monitoring forms the foundation. Not all voices carry equal influence. Identifying commentary from high credibility sources like journalists, customers or critics – allows brands to separate signals from noise and focus on conversations that truly matter.

Intelligent content classification helps decode the layered and often ambiguous nature of social media. Sarcasm, memes, and coded language can be difficult to interpret without context and demands systems that distinguish real sentiment from online chatter.

Real time impact tracking ensures brands can respond when it matters most. Monitoring the evolution of conversations enables early issue detection and opportunities. By understanding how sentiment and engagement shift over time, teams can determine whether to step in, jump on a growing trend or stay silent

Horizon scanning adds a forward-looking dimension. Tracking competitors reveals early signs of campaigns or positioning shifts and emerging audience perspectives to support both proactive and reactive planning, while also revealing evolving audience expectations and market trends.

Strategic response execution completes the framework. When a response is required, responses must be timely, genuine and platform-appropriate. Responses should reflect brand values and the tone of the conversation.

Financial Services that succeed in this environment are those that integrate insight-driven social listening with purpose-led engagement, turning digital intelligence into tangible trust and long-term customer confidence.

Aim to build credibility across channels

The fragmentation that accelerated with Threads’ arrival two years ago has fundamentally changed how financial services firms must approach brand reputation. Success no longer depends on presence across a single dominant platform. Instead, firms need systems that monitor credible sources, analyse context-dependent sentiment, track real-time impact, and anticipate emerging narratives before they crystallise into reputational or operational risks.

For financial institutions operating under intense regulatory and stakeholder scrutiny, where a single mistake can trigger lasting effects, integrating advanced social listening with platform-specific engagement is now essential. The firms that excel are those that understand that reputation is earned, maintained, and reinforced across every digital touchpoint where clients, regulators, and partners form their perceptions. In this environment, credibility is built not through scale alone, but through informed, consistent, and contextually intelligent engagement across the fragmented digital ecosystem that defines today’s financial services landscape.