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In one sense you see a lot of similarities, the key differences appear to be that Twitter users update status more frequently, use mobile devices to access the site more, and are more loyal to their brand, or 'interest'. In all other senses the demographics are roughly the same.
Facebook has the market share with the Social Graph, which is a term to describe the networking of relationships between people. With 500 million users connecting to each other Facebook dominates in this space. Facebook knows who you know, and who they know, and so on. If your wondering, it looks a little like this:
Twitter on the other hand has about a fifth the number of users, but the users it does have are more active, and are constantly talking about about their interests. This is where the Twitter model starts to diverge from Facebook. People use Twitter to talk about anything and everything, with the crucial difference that all the talk is in the public Twitter domain. Facebook status updates are restricted to your friends, or your friends of friends.
You can use Twitter to see what is going on with any particular subject. People can search for the phrase or topic they are interested in, see what is going on, and participate in the conversation. This is the Interest Graph, a system where you can participate in whatever your interest is.
The Interest Graph provides Twitter and marketing companies with a powerful tool to understand hot topics, brand impacts on target demographics and trending over time of waxing and waning interest. This is in its infancy but expect a huge growth curve ahead, possibly a valuation for Twitter exceeding Facebook.
Unless they are beaten to the punch by Groupon, whose site lets you bid for a coupon; when enough people purchase a deal is struck with the store the coupon is for, everyone wins. This is a real time Interest Graph that is profitable, in fact highly profitable: Groupon are on track to be the fastest growing company ever, including Google. This is why Groupon will outpace Twitter in this space.
The Interest Graph is a view to the future, the data it contains is the essence of societies interactions, a valuable prize for the company that wins it.
