Threads for a business: 500 characters, pictures, and a queue that runs itself

What Threads is, and who reads it

Threads is a text-first feed. A post is a short paragraph, sometimes with a picture or a video attached, and the conversation underneath it is at least half the point. It is tied to Instagram, so you sign up with an Instagram account, and the audience overlaps with Instagram's, in a lighter and more talkative mood.

For a business that means two things. The people who read you here are often the same people who follow your pictures on Instagram, but they are here to read and reply rather than to look. And the tone that works is closer to talking than to announcing. A post written like a press release reads badly on Threads in a way it does not on LinkedIn.

It rewards a few specific things. Replies, both giving and getting, because a post that starts a conversation travels further than one that only gets liked. Posting regularly, because the feed favors accounts that are around. And having an opinion, stated plainly, in under a hundred words.

It is also new enough that most businesses in most categories are not there yet, which is the honest reason to consider it: a founder who shows up twice a week with something real to say is rarer here than on any other feed, and rarity is noticed.

What 500 characters does to your writing

A Threads post is capped at 500 characters, which is about eighty words. That is not a limitation so much as an editor.

It means one idea per post. If you find yourself writing and then, you have two posts. Write the second one separately, and post it separately, a day or two later.

It means the first line is the whole post for most readers, because most readers stop there. Put the point in the first line. Put the reason in the second. If there is a third, it is the example.

It means no preamble. Every post you would have started with a bit of context, or I have been thinking about, or quick thought, loses its first forty characters to nothing. Cut them. Start on the sentence you actually meant.

And it means cutting is the skill. A useful habit: write the post at whatever length it comes out, then delete the first sentence, then delete every adjective, then see whether you are under 500. You almost always are, and the post is almost always better.

A link is allowed and is shown as a preview under the post, which takes up room and draws the eye, so use one only when the link is the point. If the link is the point, put it after the sentence that makes somebody want it, not before.

Two other things the limit makes you decide. Hashtags cost characters and do very little here, so one at most. And a post that is a question does better than a post that is a statement, because Threads is a place where people answer.

Pictures on Threads: up to ten, and square reads best

A post can carry up to ten pictures, which means a carousel of slides works here in the same way it does on Instagram and LinkedIn, and a single picture works too.

Square is the shape that reads best in the feed, 1080 by 1080. A tall picture is cropped in the feed and shown whole only when tapped, so if the words are on the picture, keep them near the middle.

What a picture is for on Threads is different from Instagram. On Instagram the picture is the post. On Threads the words are the post and the picture is the proof: the screenshot of the number, the photo of the thing you are describing, the chart that shows what you just claimed. A picture that decorates gets scrolled past. A picture that shows what the words said gets saved.

So the pictures that carry are the same ones that carry everywhere for a founder. Your own product on a real desk. A chart with one number on it. The slide with the finding. The photograph you took of the problem before you fixed it. And if the words are set on the picture, in your own colors and typeface, a plain sentence over a real photograph outperforms anything that looks like a template.

Ten pictures is the maximum, not the target. Three good ones beat ten that were there to fill the count.

Video on Threads

Threads takes video as well, up to a few minutes, and it plays in the feed. A vertical video made for TikTok or Shorts plays upright here, at its own shape, rather than being refused or cropped.

That makes Threads a good third home for a video you have already made, at no extra cost. The same file, with a short post above it saying what it is, and the words already on the screen so it works muted, which in a text feed it will almost always be.

What to avoid is making a video for Threads. The audience here is reading. A video should be one that exists already because it was worth making for a video feed, and here it is a bonus.

If you are making videos from a script rather than filming, one file serves every feed, and Threads is one more account to tick when you schedule it.

A week of Threads in one sitting

The rhythm is the same one that works for every platform, written up in the social media system one founder can run: one story a week, chosen on Monday, written in one sitting, scheduled ahead. Threads changes only the shape of the pieces.

A week is three to five posts. That sounds like more than it is, because on Threads each one is eighty words.

• The finding, stated. The one thing you learned this week, in two lines. This is the post that reaches strangers.
• The question it raised. Asked plainly, to your readers. This is the post that gets replies, and replies are what Threads rewards.
• The picture that proves it. The chart, the screenshot, the photograph, with one sentence over it.
• The opinion. What you now think, in under a hundred words, stated as though somebody might disagree. Because somebody will, and that is the conversation.
• The video, if there is one. The one you made for the vertical feeds, with a line above it.

That is four or five posts from one story and about an hour of writing, including the cutting. Space them across the week rather than posting them all on Monday.

Then ten minutes a day for replies. On Threads this is not optional and it is not admin. It is the part where a reader becomes a conversation, and the accounts that grow here are the ones that answer.

Queue it, and check it landed

Everything above runs on a notes file and the app. What Posts inside LaunchValid takes off you is the writing from a blank page, the design, and the delivery.

Threads is one of the accounts you connect, alongside LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Facebook and Pinterest. A piece written once is rendered for each of them at its own size, so the square Threads gets is its own render rather than a crop of somebody else's. A caption that runs past 500 characters is said again, shorter, for Threads, checked against your own words before it is used, so every link survives and the ending still lands rather than being cut off mid-thought.

The week planner is the part that matches this guide. Give it a theme, an optional voice, and the mix you want, some posts, a carousel, a video or two, up to fourteen pieces across every platform you publish to. One pass writes related angles for the whole week rather than fourteen unrelated posts, and picks a good hour for each in your audience's time zone. Planning costs nothing. When you approve the week, one price on the button covers the writing, the pictures and the videos at the qualities you chose, and that price is a ceiling.

A clock then delivers each piece at its time, once, and checks it actually reached the feed. One refused in a passing outage goes back on the clock, one that fails for good sends you an email, and one press stops everything in a week that has not yet posted.

If a thought arrives while you are away from your desk, the assistant in Telegram turns a sentence into a designed post in your own colors, or sets your words on a picture you send it, with Schedule under it in the chat.

What none of it does is know what you learned this week. The notes file is still yours, and it is still the part that makes any of this worth reading.