PREFACE
The juxtaposition of Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) and Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) is staggering.
STORY: JUXTAPOSITION
It turns out that both Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc have extremely high brand awareness. Here’s a chart with data powered by Edison Research and Triton Digital.
Both companies show very high levels of familiarity in the United States, and while Twitter Inc lags a touch behind Facebook Inc, it’s hardly a competitive advantage. But we can go further with the similarities of the two companies. Next we looked at usage by age for 2015.
This data was compiled by comScore, eMarketer and Adweek. We can see slight differences – that Twitter Inc has slightly higher usage by the older generations, or said differently, Facebook Inc skews younger, but the differences are tiny. Again, there is no real competitive advantage, or difference here.
Of course, everyone knows that there is a huge difference between these two firms. Facebook has 1.7 billion monthly average users while Twitter has just 313 million. Here are some side-by-side financial charts that are simply staggering
Facebook has $22.2 billion in revenue in the trailing-twelve-months versus Twitter’s $2.5 billion in the same period. Net income is ever more skewed, with Facebook showing a $6 billion after tax profit and Twitter showing a $409 million loss. For the sake of sanity we’ll keep it to just one more image, this time just the side-by-side revenue chart:
SO WHAT?
While the first two charts we looked demonstrate rather clearly that Facebook Inc and Twitter Inc have extremely high (and similar) brand awareness and usage by age, the two companies are totally different with respect to user adoption and financial success.
While there are endless ways to carry the results to a reasoned explanation, like Facebook users go the social site to find people they are already friends with while Twitter users go to the site to engage with people they don’t know yet, the reality is, the staggering differences in adoption and stock appreciation are incredibly frustrating for Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR) shareholders.
For now, execution ad infinitum, goes to Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg and team over at Facebook. It just does.
The author is long shares of Twitter Inc. (NYSE:TWTR), and has no position in Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ:FB).
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