Facebook versus Twitter is the Batman versus Superman of social media

For a brief moment, Mark Zuckerberg actually thought Twitter might overtake Facebook.

It was 2008-2009. Twitter, which launched its 140 character revolution ten years ago this week, was still enjoying the kind of skyrocketing user growth and fawning press coverage that startup founders pray to the Internet gods for.

“I looked at their [growth] rate and thought if this continues for 12 months or 18 months, then in a year they’re going to be bigger than us,” Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and CEO, told one industry publication in 2010 about his one-time fixation with Twitter.

He was right — but only to an extent. Hundreds of millions of people created Twitter accounts only to abandon them. Twitter’s user growth gradually petered out, capping at around 300 million last year. Facebook kept growing, topping the one billion mark, then passing 1.5 billion and still going.

By any measure, Facebook has won the social media war. Its market value is 30-times larger than Twitter. It has the largest reach of any social network, with multiple services at or near the one billion-user mark. But it can’t quite seem to give up its years-long battle to take back more of the public conversation from Twitter.

“Facebook has always wanted its information to be more public and open and have more newsworthy and celebrity content,” says Josh Elman, a VC partner at Greylock and former product manager at both Facebook and Twitter.

For much of the decade since Twitter launched, the two companies have repeatedly butted heads. 

They competed to buy startups like Instagram, poached each other’s top executives, “borrowed” each other’s product ideas, lobbed occasional insults at one another and made competing pitches for advertising dollars, user attention and talent. 

Twitter, meanwhile, refuses to give up the old dream of matching Facebook’s tremendous reach. “Over the years,” Elman says, “Twitter wanted to have more of the growth and engagement of Facebook within its network.”

As Twitter enters the next decade, its future may be determined in large part by whether Facebook ever succeeds in siphoning off more of the public conversation that has long been its selling point — as well as whether Twitter ever moves to distance itself from the lofty expectations set by its one-time rival.

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in 2010.

Just settin up my rvlry

When Zuckerberg feels Facebook is threatened by an emerging social network, he usually resorts to one of two strategies: buy it, or build it.

With Twitter, the Facebook CEO has bounced between both approaches over the years.

Six months after Twitter launched in 2006, Facebook overhauled itself by releasing the first version of News Feed, moving from being a collection of profile pages to a source of personal news more in line with Twitter’s news feed.

Those two product launches effectively created the current mainstream social media experience: timelines full of congratulatory posts, political squabbles, ads, intimate celebrity encounters, ads, publishers promoting content and brands injecting themselves everywhere as an alternative to just ads.

On at least two occasions during those first years, Zuckerberg lobbied to acquire Twitter for as much as $500 million, but was rebuffed, according to Hatching Twitter, a tell-all book about Twitter’s early days. Twitter’s team had bigger dreams.

With an acquisition out of the question, Facebook went back to gradually building its own version of Twitter, while simultaneously trying to beat back or acquire other up-and-coming businesses like Snapchat, Instagram and WhatsApp.

Facebook built a hub for real-time news around the World Cup in 2014.

Facebook’s flawed fight for Twitter’s real-time empire

Over the years, Facebook has introduced Twitter-style @-mentions and following options, developed Twitter-like trending topics and pushed to make posts publicly searchable, just like Twitter. 

Facebook has even built dedicated hubs to for global events like the World Cup to encourage real-time conversation. 

Zuckerberg himself is said to be “obsessed” with live-streaming, a key focus for Twitter last year. Facebook may even try to pay celebrities to live stream on the social network — perhaps recognizing how vital celebrities have been to Twitter. 

“People are already using Facebook to share during real-time events. It’s an increasingly important use case for us,” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO said on a conference call with analysts in January.

While some of these efforts have outpaced Twitter — anecdotally, we’ve heard members of the media say Facebook livestreaming has a wider audience than Twitter’s tool, Periscope — Facebook is still not known as much for its real-time, public-facing conversations. 

“Real-time is something they’ve been trying to crack over the last several years and haven’t fully cracked it yet,” says Debra Aho Williamson, a social media analyst with eMarketer, a digital marketing research firm. “That’s what keeps them coming back: ‘How do we make Facebook more real-time within the confines of what Facebook is?'”

And the confines of Facebook remain the same: friends and family sharing (mostly) meaningful news and moments in a (mostly) private manner. It is not, like Twitter, a place for sharing dozens of spontaneous musings in a single day with strangers to tap into the fleeting public zeitgeist around some tweetstorm from Kanye West that will be deleted 15 minutes later anyway.

On Twitter, you come for the thrill of watching the raw moment unfold. Like tracing back the Big Bang to its first rumblings. It is a place to snark, outrage, pontificate, test theories, promote yourself shamelessly, holler at public figures like lunatics in a movie theater, or just “whoa if true.” 

Twitter is a frenetic, messy, participatory sport with hundreds of millions of die-hard fans. 

Facebook is the cleaned up newspaper you get the next morning telling you how it all went down. 

“Facebook is more about the bigger moments and interacting with your friends,” Wiliamson says. “It doesn’t seem to feel like the type of place where things flame up and flame down very quickly like they do on Twitter.” 

More people prefer Facebook’s version, apparently. But Facebook would like to ensure it has a little more of both experiences.

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Icons for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and Pinterest are displayed on a window, Wednesday, Jan. 13, 2016, in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan)

The Facebookification of Twitter

As Facebook looks to borrow the best of Twitter, Twitter has attempted to remedy its stalled user growth by taking pages from Facebook’s playbook — inviting comparisons to its much larger rival in the process. 

Since going public in late 2013, Twitter has (in no particular order) swapped out Favorites with Likes, shifted from text to more emphasis on photos and videos, rolled out Facebook-style profile pages, reconsidered its character strict limits and tinkered with its signature reverse chronological feed by bringing out the algorithms.

Both companies are frequently mentioned in the same breath on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley and among the general public. 

At one time, the inevitable comparisons were flattering to Twitter and worrying to Facebook. But as Facebook has lapped Twitter on user and revenue growth, investors have punished the little blue bird for falling short of its peer.

“The challenge with Twitter and Facebook is there’s really nothing else to compare them to, in terms of product,” says Jan Dawson, a technology analyst with Jackdaw Research. “The Facebook comparison increasingly hurts Twitter because it never reached its potential as the next Facebook.”

“And if it isn’t Facebook,” he added, “what is it?”

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