Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg informed staff on Thursday that Meta Platforms executives are putting a lot of effort into increasing retention on Threads, their new Twitter competitor, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its buzzy launch.

Despite being “not perfect,” user retention on the text-based app was better than executives had anticipated, according to Zuckerberg, who was addressing at an internal company town hall and whose audio was obtained by the media.

“Obviously, if you have more than 100 million people sign up, ideally it would be awesome if all of them or even half of them stuck around. We’re not there yet,” he said.

According to Zuckerberg, the drop-off is “normal” and retention will increase as the business continues to add capabilities to the app, such as a desktop version and search functionality.

According to Chief Product Officer Chris Cox, Meta is considering introducing more “retention-driving hooks” to lure users to return to the service, such as “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads.”

The meeting was not discussed further by a business spokeswoman.

The executives’ remarks came a day after Meta astounded investors with a bright revenue growth estimate, signalling a company’s comeback after facing intense criticism for its big investment in the metaverse last year as ad sales plunged.

On Thursday, shares of Meta rose 8% as a result of the revelation.

On the conference call, Zuckerberg expressed his opinion that the company’s work on the augmented and virtual reality technologies that will power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track.”

Given their years of experience developing operating systems for current goods, competitors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, he continued, Meta needed to start investing in that effort before them.

“That way, we have all the tools ready for when this is ready for prime time,” he said, predicting that mass adoption of metaverse technologies would take place in the 2030s.

The introduction of the Llama 2 artificial intelligence model by the business this month, which it made freely available for commercial usage to any developer whose services had fewer than 700 million users, was another noteworthy development mentioned by Zuckerberg and Cox.

In the week since it was made available, the model has gotten more than 150,000 download requests, according to Cox.

In response to a query regarding the envisioned “cage match” between himself and Elon Musk, Zuckerberg said he was “not sure if it’s going to come together.”

(Adapted from USNews.com)