Increase adoption
Increase Threads adoption among Facebook users who hadn't yet joined.
Context
The Threads promotional unit in Facebook Feed was generating impressions but not conversions. Shown inline as users scrolled, it blended into the feed without creating a reason to stop. The core challenge: making a promotional unit feel personally relevant at scale.
Problem
The unit needed a reason to stop the scroll. My hypothesis: People are more likely to try a new app when they see that their friends are already using it. Social proof, specifically showing recognizable friend faces, would create a personal connection that generic units couldn't achieve.
Goals
Re-engage dormant users
Re-engage users who had accounts but stopped using the app.
Protect Facebook quality
Maintain Facebook experience quality, with no regressions to core engagement or notification metrics.
Design process
1 Research & Discovery
Users didn't recognize Threads usernames (IG-style handles) as people they knew on Facebook, a cross-platform identity gap that undermined connection.
There was low ambient awareness that close friends were already active on Threads. The missing piece wasn't interest; it was signal.
Young adults responded well to notifications but spent less time scrolling feed, making a multi-surface strategy essential, not optional.
2 Identifying Opportunities
Mapping the Facebook user journey surfaced four high-intent touchpoints where social proof would feel natural and valuable, not intrusive:
3 Design Explorations
Multiple concepts were explored across the identified surfaces:
Final Designs
Results
Impact & Learnings
Social proof outperformed generic promotion. Showing specific friends was dramatically more effective than benefit-driven messaging alone, validating the hypothesis that personalized social context changes behavior at a level generic promotion cannot reach.
Identity consistency matters across platforms. Displaying recognizable display names instead of unfamiliar handles significantly improved click-through rates and friend recognition, a meaningful finding for any cross-app surface strategy.
Notifications are powerful but sensitive. Conservative frequency caps and quality metric monitoring were essential to delivering growth without degrading the Facebook notification experience. Growth and quality were treated as co-equal constraints from day one.
A phased approach reduces risk and builds confidence. Launching in Feed first, then expanding to Notifications, allowed the pattern to be validated at lower touch before scaling to higher-frequency, higher-stakes surfaces.
What's Next
Expanding social proof to Stories and Reels surfaces, extending the pattern to full-screen, higher-attention formats.
Testing expanded targeting to reach additional user segments beyond the initial cohorts.
Exploring richer social signals (friend activity, shared interests, mutual interactions) beyond simple platform presence.