Social media today has been a phenomenon since people are accepting it to be part of their daily lives.
As businesses in a growing industry, money making is always made the top of the priority to ensure productiveness. With the advancing handheld devices, improving internet connection and the mass amount of users, social media is trying their best to embrace mobile and ads.
Facebook and Twitter are two of the "Big 3" with YouTube. With revenues that mainly come from advertisements, these two social giants are targeting their mobile users to an increase of revenue.
Everyone knows that the future of Facebook and Twitter is on mobile, but it's not at all clear yet how either company will cash in on the shift away from the web. For Twitter, the job is all that much harder if it can't even control where its users access the service.
After promoted tweets, the "mobile first" strategy is revealed by Twitter. The microblogging giant achieved two key goals: creating a look and feel that more than ever resembles Facebook's, and asserting new dominance over users' Twitter experience.
On the surface, the announcements of new Twitter profiles that is available across all devices and operating systems with a single cover photo, as well as a new photo stream, and an all-new iPad app, are essentially incremental moves to streamline users' mobile experiences.
For years, the company has been limiting their third-party options, either through acquisitions of popular apps like TweetDeck or through locking out third-party photo services like TwitPic. This is done quietly by Twitter with the new versions of its mobile apps. And all in the guise of gaining more control over the advertising revenue generated by the service.
With active users that exceed 140 million and over 400 million daily tweets, the user experience is somehow fragmented. Whereas Facebook keeps its users essentially locked into its "wall" of its website interface and its mobile apps, Twitter's users access the service not just through its website and apps, but also through a broad set of third-party apps such as Hootsuite, MetroTwit, Echofon, and others.
Twitter has been trying for some time to bring all of its apps together under a single consistent user experience. Twitter wants users to feel like they have the same experience regardless of what platform or device they access their tweet.
Since Twitter doesn't make as much money when a user sees tweets through a third-party app. There's been much many talks about the growing enmity between Twitter and third-party developers in the wake of the company's decision to limit outsiders' access to its APIs.
While Facebook and Twitter are fundamentally different services, there's little doubt that each has some features the other is trying to replicate. With today's changes, it's evident that having a large, single profile photo, as well as easy access to a photo stream are elements of Facebook that Twitter wanted to bring to its own users.
Facebook, as part of its ongoing attempt to make money off mobile, is letting businesses with Facebook pages promote posts using an app on their smartphones.
The newest version of Facebook's Pages Manager app allows users to pick their promoted posts, and the social network will deliver the message to users far and wide, for a fee directly from the app.
The ability to buy the ads directly from mobile phones was a widely requested feature from small businesses, according to Facebook. It's just the latest tweak for Facebook as it works to exploit the commercial opportunities provided by its quickly-growing mobile platform.