Thread your way to success

Recently, two European customers have asked us for help with (re)launching their B2C product in Taiwan. Curiously, these customers had one thing in common: both wanted to use their (outdated) European FB/Insta playbook strategy to save on cost.

Bad decision.

In Taiwan, FB is for cat videos and fishing club invites. The real platform to use is Threads. Tiny Taiwan (23m people) accounts for a quarter of all global Threads traffic, with over 260 million posts/conversations a year. Posts in Taiwan also generate about 6 comments each, making these a core signal rather than a side metric.

The upside? Insane reach. Fast metrics (you know what works within days). Genuine conversions. Affordable, agile. And yes: fun if you are a cool brand.

The downside? Labor-intensive. Demanding, hands-on no autopilot, no out-of-the box solutions. And you can forget about using your glitzy corporate videos, brand boilerplate and glossy pictures: they have limited use. Discussions on Threads like to keep it real. You need to start from scratch.

My point: local "translation" is not just shifting languages, it is about adapting to the culture of the media and the media of the culture.