Why Facebook shouldn’t look as much on Twitter…
Several weeks ago, Facebook made some changes on its way of working. This time, I must notice that change management was better dealt than with the terms of use. However, once again, the users do not like the changes. After having tried to buy Twitter, (several offers around $ 500M in cash or Facebook participation were refused), the Facebook strategy changed. The new objective was « to kill Twitter ». They created for example Facebook connect at the end of 2008, the first results seem interesting (even if I still don’t like it, more about this here). The Facebook status is no more asking you « What are you doing? » but What’s on your mind? » and there’s no more difference between your status and your wall. Last month, Facebook made the most serious change for me, they opened the users status. Yes, exactly like on Twitter. And to finish, the Facebook profile can be now opened to « Everyone ». You can find a quick sum up about this strategy on AllFacebook.
A last strange fact, Mark Zuckergerg, the famous CEO of Facebook, created a Twitter account. You must think that is weird. As I read once again on AllFacebook, « imagine if Mark Zuckerberg decided to set up a MySpace page to start promoting himself in order to reach a different audience, Do you think he would do that? I doubt it.« .
To sum up, I don’t really get why Facebook is so aggressive against Twitter. Many people talked before about the competition between LinkedIn or other social networks such as MySpace but finally, everyone realised that was not relevant, they have different objectives or different positions. With Twitter, I think that is the same.
I will consider my way of using Facebook and Twitter but I think it corresponds perfectly to any current Facebook & Twitter user. I use Twitter because I love Web, Advertising and Photography and most of my Twitter friends share at least one of these passions. With Twitter, you can meet people, with Facebook, no. I bet that your Facebook friends (or at least 95%) are people that you met once in your life. That’s the first big difference between both, Facebook is a Real Life Network contrary to Twitter which represents a Passion Network. If we think a bit more about this point, we will realise that Facebook is a long-term usage instead of short time usage for Twitter, maybe I should say Real Time usage. You can have news in real time on Twitter and Twitter Search thank to clever accounts like TwitScoop for example. This way of working is maybe a weakness for the moment for Twitter because people (I mean normal people, not like web addicts as me for example and digital people) maybe do not spend so much time on Internet but with the next mobile generation (iPhone, Android and all the Smartphones), it will getting better.
Concerning the relations you can have with them, there’s a new big difference. On Twitter, you follow or are followed by. On Facebook, there is a mutual « agreement » or the relation does not exist (OK Facebook changed this but that’s still the main way of running). In addition, I think that if you are inactive on Twitter could lost you some followers. On Facebook, you don’t care. You are friends because you don’t need to have a day-to-day relation but only because one day, it will be nice or usefull to know to eachothers and to get back in touch.
Of course, Facebook has more than 150 000 000 users against 6 000 000 for Twitter… yeah actually 25 times more users than Twitter.
And a last crucial difference is the content. Facebook is becoming more and more open and accepts many relations with other social networks such as Last.fm, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter… You share photos, videos, groups, organise events (real life actually) and play with funky applications. With Twitter, you share 140 characters so many many links. You can’t have more open than this. As we said before, the network is different so you don’t share the same things, the same minds.
To sum up, even if both did not find yet their business models (I mean a relevant one). I think they won’t have a collision (as suggested here). if I were in Facebook, I would try to compet with Google instead… even if Google do not do so much in Social Media (except YouTube but it was not the first objective when they acquired the video platform), they realised that their OpenSocial. The « meta-social platform » which aggregates all the social networks, won’t be so successful until several years. The Google Connect community is just starting. Maybe they’re thinking to buy Twitter… and in this case, it wouldn’t be only for Social Media but to have the most complete and powerful ever search engine (real time search with Twitter Search + Google search).
