Though facebook has been the predominant social media over the past few years it is facing another threat that if not checked could substantially eat into its market share. The social media is a very fluid industry and the companies have to be very innovative and dynamic in order to withstand any onslaught.Facebook tried to buy twitter for $500 million but twitter declined. Twitter is really remarkable now and many businesses and celebrities are using it to reach their fans. Even US president Barrack Obama had a twitter page from where he used to update his supporters on the progress of the campaign. Recently facebook introduced changes to its services to make it more real time and removing private pages to make it more celebrity friendly. However facebook has to be more careful in order not to face privacy suits as it has recently. Twitter is a threat to facebook because:
1. Facebook and twitter are completely different types of networks.Facebook is a network where you know people personally and want to build social contacts with them. However in twitter you don’t know people but instead you know them through the information they share.
2.Of course twitter is very simple to use as opposed to facebook.Facebook’s status updates, profile pages and video and picture uploads are much more complicated than those of twitter. The average internet user isn’t patient enough to familiarize themselves with the complicated details of facebook.Twitter has only 140 characters which are easy to use.
3. Information can easily be accessed through twitter. You can access twitter through the web, desktop applications, sms and third party applications. Twitter can deliver updates through sms making it accessible to anyone with a cell phone. It is a kind of a mobile network.Facebook on the other hand is more of a web application.
4. Twitter is public while facebook is private. You have to sign up with facebook to see any part of it while profiles and messages for twitter are public unless you confirm otherwise. In terms of applications such as search indexing twitter has a major advantage.
5. Twitter has a search engine in form of twitter search whereas facebook doesn’t have. The twitter search will play a very pivotal role in revenue earnings of twitter. The search application allows for real time searching of information on twitter. You can therefore monitor events and trends as they happen.
6. Twitter has API.The development of API has led thousand’s of applications that use twitter. You can therefore comfortably use twitter without going to the web interface. To use facebook applications you have to be signed in. This closed approach has limited the way people can use the applications and curtailed money making opportunities for the company.
Of course twitter just started recently and the competition between the two social media giants is going to be intense.Facebook has more than 180 million users and it is interesting to see what steps it will take to counter the growth of twitter. In the tech industry you never really know where the next competitor is going to come from and the above points just point to the fluidity of the tech sector. One only needs to look at AOL and myspace to realize that the big thing now might be overtaken by a start up in no time.
