UPDATED 07:50 EDT / JUNE 12 2012

Twitter Shows Facebook How to Make It In Mobile

Facebook could learn a thing or two from Twitter, it would seem. One of the major concerns being voiced by Facebook chiefs in recent weeks is how its future advertising revenues might be negatively affected as more users embrace mobile devices – but as far as Twitter are concerned, such a shift is not going to cause problems.

On the contrary, as Twitter CEO Dick Costolo announced in a recent interview, Twitter is “born of mobile”, and “set up for success” in the mobile arena.

Speaking at a San Francisco conference, Costolo gave some fascinating insights into the workings of Twitter, revealing that it now counts over 140 million active users, who between them generate some 400 million tweets each day.

What’s really set the cat amongst the pigeons however, is Costolo’s claim that Twitter’s mobile users are actually more active than those who are strictly desktop. Moreover, Costolo revealed that Twitter now generates more advertising revenue from mobile users than those who are non-mobile:

“(Twitter ads are) inherently suited to mobile because Tweets are suited for mobile. Even though we launched first on the web and only started to run on mobile a few months ago. It’s already been the case a couple weeks ago that mobile ad revenue in a day was greater than non-mobile. Mobile revenue is already doing delightfully well.”

Twitter has ramped up efforts to generate revenues ever since Costolo took over the top job at the firm in late 2010. One of the first moves made by Costolo, back in February 2011, was to introduce ads into the timeline of all mobile Twitter users. A month later, Twitter rolled out its promotional tweet feature, which allows companies to pay for sponsored tweets to reach all Android and iPhone Twitter users – some 60% of all users on Twitter.

Costolo was clearly taking a little swipe at the much publicized challenges that Facebook is facing in the mobile arena, yet his revelations will actually be seen as encouraging news by several internet companies.

Along with Facebook, the likes of LinkedIn, Google, Zynga and many others have all been trying to devise a way to generate profits on the mobile web, and so the Twitter model could well be critical to their futures.


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