What's changed
Threads announced on 30 June that it's adding translation support, new host tools, and expanded access to its Live Chats feature. Access has been opened to all Community Champions, described by the company as users who are highly followed within their communities, regularly post in those communities, and keep conversations active.
Hosts can now invite up to three co-hosts into their Live Chat to make it easier to manage conversations. Hosts can now delete messages for everyone, and the platform is testing ways to make host messages appear more visually prominent in chats.
The translation feature is the most significant addition for global events. With support for translations, conversations in chats become more accessible to users around the world.
Users can send messages, photos, videos, links, and emoji reactions. Up to 150 participants can actively send messages in a chat. Once this limit is reached, additional users can still view the conversation, react to messages, and participate in polls in spectator mode.
Why this matters for social marketers
Live Chats are a text-based, group real-time engagement format. X Spaces is audio-only. That difference is the point.
Threads is now further differentiating itself with Live Chats, a feature designed for real-time engagement that even X doesn't have. Spaces requires you to listen or speak. Live Chats let you read, type, share images, drop links, and vote in polls while doing something else. For brands running live product drops, sports activations, or creator Q&As, that's a lower barrier to entry and a more flexible engagement mechanic.
The translation layer makes this format immediately viable for global campaigns. A brand hosting a chat around the World Cup or a creator discussing K-pop can now bring in participants who don't share a language. X Spaces has no equivalent.
The co-host feature gives brands operational control they've been asking for. Managing 150 active participants alone is difficult; Threads says the co-host capability is the equivalent of having a guest on your show or another voice to moderate a conversation. For agencies running live chats on behalf of clients, or creators bringing in guests, this removes a significant friction point.
Since the feature's launch, Threads says it has seen hundreds of chats hosted almost daily with thousands of users joining. That's still modest scale, but it's early, the format is expanding, and Threads reached 500 million monthly active users earlier this month, nearly three years after launching as a competitor to X.
What brands should do
If you're running live moments on social, test Live Chats now while the format is still wide open. The combination of text, media, translation, and co-hosting gives you more control and inclusivity than audio-only Spaces. Schedule a chat around a product launch, a sports event, or a creator collab. Use the co-host slot to bring in a partner brand, an influencer, or a subject expert.
If you're a Community Champion, you now have access. If you're not, the criteria are influence within a community, regular posting, and keeping conversations active. Build that profile.
Translation makes global activations realistic. If your audience spans markets, or you're targeting an international event, Live Chats are now functionally multilingual in a way X Spaces is not.
Threads also teased that desktop support is coming soon and that pinned messages are in the works, both of which have been highly requested by creators. That means the format will only get more useful for brands managing chats from a control room or war room setup.
The broader context
When Threads first launched, it struggled to compete with X as a destination for real-time conversations as it lacked key features like robust search, hashtags, and a chronological feed. Since then, Threads has added these capabilities and is now further differentiating itself with Live Chats.
X still dominates real-time text conversation overall, but it no longer owns every real-time engagement format. Spaces is mature and widely used, but it's audio, and it requires you to stop what you're doing. Live Chats are participatory, multimedia, and passive-friendly. For brands, that's a different use case and a different audience behaviour.
Threads is moving fast. The features added today are in response to what creators have been requesting, Threads says. If the platform continues to ship creator-led features at this pace, Live Chats could become the default real-time group engagement format for text-first brands.