Meta Platforms executives are focused heavily on boosting retention on their new Twitter rival, Threads, after the app lost more than half of its users in the weeks following its buzzy launch, CEO Mark Zuckerberg told employees on Thursday.

Retention of users on the text-based app was better than executives had expected, though it was “not perfect”, said Zuckerberg, speaking at an internal company town hall.

“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.

Zuckerberg said he considered the drop-off “normal” and expected retention to grow as the company adds more features to the app, including a desktop version and search functionality.

Meta is looking at adding more “retention-driving hooks” to entice users to return to the app, like “making sure people who are on the Instagram app can see important Threads”, said chief product officer Chris Cox.

A company spokesman declined to comment on the meeting.

The executives’ comments came a day after Meta wowed investors with a rosy revenue growth forecast, a sign of a comeback for a company that faced deep scepticism over its hefty spending on the metaverse last year as ad sales plummeted.

The disclosure sent Meta’s shares surging 8% on Thursday.

‘On track’

Zuckerberg told employees on the call that he believed the company’s work on the augmented and virtual reality technology that would power the metaverse was “not massively ahead of schedule, but on track”.

Meta, he added, needed to get started investing in that work ahead of rivals such as Apple, Google and Microsoft, given their years of experience building operating systems for existing products.

“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.