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Twitter is essentially a modern-day “Speakers’ Corner”, where anyone can hold forth and others can talk back. Social-media scholars refer to it as a one-to-many broadcast network. Facebook is at its core a one-to-one or one-to-a-few network, replicating social relationships of the sort between friends, family or colleagues.
The difference may seem subtle, but it has several implications for the two firms’ businesses. For starters, Facebook is able to gather more data about its users because they are more engaged with other users. This makes it easier to target ads. Facebook also benefits from stronger “network effects”, meaning that each additional subscriber makes the service more useful for others, which attracts more subscribers, and so on. Twitter cannot rely on such a turbocharged engine of growth: while having friends is a human need, maintaining a soapbox is non-essential even for the world’s extroverts.Share
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