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In Twitter’s internal strategy documents published by Techcrunch, it’s pretty clear that Twitter sees Facebook as competition. Not only is the company racing to 1 billion users but they are also trying to determine ways that Facebook could kill them. We’ve been discussing the Twitter/Facebook battle since the beginning of the year when we suggested Facebook could kill Twitter.
Facebook is also clearly looking into ways to get rid of the Twitter threat and right now they are also testing out their own internal program to distribute status updates to Twitter. In the flick of the switch, all public status updates could effectively overload Twitter’s service in theory. Who knows what the real purpose of integration with Twitter is but it’s clear that the battle is on (and has been for this whole year).
There’s an entire strategy lined out in Erick Schonfeld’s post about how to defend against the Facebook threat which is becoming an increasing one despite Twitter’s ongoing growth. Twitter is even considering creating a “Twitter Developers fund” to compete with the fbFund, one of the primary tools Facebook uses for keeping developers coming to the platform.
One thing Twitter doesn’t discuss in their competitive strategy however is creating a groups functionality to compete with Pages, something that I think Twitter could benefit from greatly. Despite the lack of a clear vision, the company is looking to push toward the 1 billion user mark while increasing revenue per user per year up to $1. Right now, $4 million for the year, or less than $0.25 per user appears to be even questionable.
The company is also exploring various revenue models, none of which are really a surprise except for a potential payments platform and a potential adsense-like product. Their biggest weakness though: the inability to support a billion users and perhaps even less. This is potentially what Facebook could be looking to do by promoting Twitter with built in integration.
While this battle will continue to play out over the next year, it’s clear that both companies have their sights on each other. The only question that it leaves me asking is: what are they missing while they are competing against one another?
Twitter will never be a challenge to Facebook, in one year we will see Farewell Twitter
Twitter may not be much of a challenge to Facebook, however Twitter will not die out unless it fails to find a marketing and funding strategy; something Facebook has managed very well from the early days.
The fundamental differences are simple to see. Facebook is an application platform with a good advertising model. It’s that advertising model that generates the income it has now. Couple that with pages and now product lines are making very good use of that as well.
Sure, some products have managed to pull off a good marketing blitz or two on Twitter, but the buzz falls off fast and is soon forgotten. Twitter doesn’t get a bit of revenue out of this, so it’s only a win for the product marketer. Marketing on Facebook is win win for both parties.
Twitter is an information dissemination tool like no other ever seen before it. People can get the word out on an issue and fast. A micro story on Twitter can turn into a firestorm in a very short amount of time, as the Iran election has proven. Facebook has the potential do the very same thing with a much broader end user experience.
Both have their uses for everyone in all arenas of life, be that politics, application development, marketing and more.
all i remember about your “facebook killing twitter” post was how kara swisher reamed your sorry ass.
btw, you used to have me blocked from commenting on your silly posts, why not now? Facebook Connect won’t let you?
Saturday, July 18, 2009, is LIKE Day. Click on every single “Like” you see on Facebook on July 18 (PDT). If you “Like” enough times, something awesome may happen.
Copy this to your Facebook status (and twitter) so everyone knows. The more Likes the better!
Even if Twitter finds a way to monetize their traffic effectively, I don’t see them overtaking Facebook in the long run. Facebook is a worldwide phenomenon and owns the social networking game right now. Only they can screw it up IMHO.
If they work together they can both hit 1 billion users, but that would be too easy.
It’s good that twitter consider facebook as a direct competitor because if they don’t think like this so how they can grow?