What is the positive meaning of Twitter's replication of the Facebook model?

According to foreign media reports, Facebook and Twitter are the most successful social networking platforms in American history. The two have been significantly different at the beginning of the development, but a series of recent moves by Twitter have shown that it is imitating Facebook in some core areas.

Twitter's page layout has been modified many times, but there are two parts that Twitter insists on keeping unchanged, and one is that Twitter speakers can accept up to 140 characters, and the comments are arranged according to the response time near. Twitter is now considering making some changes to the latter.

Anthony Noto, Twitter's chief financial officer, spent a lot of time at the Citigroup 2014 Global technology conference earlier this month to Noto to participants about Twitter's "custom timetable" concept, Twitter has a special algorithm for calculating which comments will make the most sense, and these most meaningful comments will appear in the list of comments as a priority. The fact that comments are arranged according to specific algorithms has been applied on Facebook, and Facebook uses this approach to enable users to interact well with their friends and family. As for the Enterprise page, the above method can push the advertising content to those who are most willing to buy.

Noto the Twitter commentary as a "Facebook-style arrangement" in the way it was sorted by special algorithms, which is not the first time Twitter has "doctrine" on Facebook, and this July Facebook announced a "buy" button on the page. , and the same button appears on Twitter's pages only two months later.

Why does Twitter have to make changes, especially so much to mimic Facebook's changes? I think Twitter is doing this to increase the number of users, enhance their attractiveness to advertisers and increase the frequency with which users interact with others on Twitter.

In recent quarters, Twitter has experienced "cold weather" in terms of user growth. Twitter has 271 million active subscribers a month, while Facebook is up to 1.3 billion active subscribers a month. A recent survey by Deutsche Bank showed that 85% of previous Twitter users had fewer than 30 fans. Some analysts point out that having a large number of fans and being active on Twitter is key to ensuring that users stick to the Twitter platform. The findings also show that 78% of the previous Twitter users complained of too much comment and a lack of sorting.

According to data released by market research agency Statista, 92% of respondents to 500 large business marketing professionals said their companies had an official homepage on Facebook, compared with 23% of Twitter's official home page. More and more corporate users are seeing the glamour and value of Facebook, and Twitter is actively imitating Facebook's features in the hope of gaining more users ' favor.

Brian Nichols, author of this article, is a contributor to Motley Fool, an industry-profiling website in the US.

(Responsible editor: Mengyishan)