Twitter's Growth Pales in Comparison to Facebook's

When Twitter reported its fourth quarter earnings yesterday, those who hoped that the company had found a way to reignite its stagnant user growth were disappointed once again. During the fourth quarter of 2014, Twitter added just 4 million users to reach an active user base of 288 million. While that is still an increase of 20% year-over-year, it is also further proof that Twitter will never be as big as Facebook.

To illustrate how far apart both company’s are in terms of user growth, we compared Twitter’s growth over the past two years with Facebook’s growth between 2009 and 2010. Starting off with 197 million active users in Q1 2009, Facebook added 411 million users within two years. Twitter, having had 204 million users in Q1 2013, only managed to add 84 million to its user base in the same amount of time.

The good news for Twitter is that its revenue is growing much quicker than its active user base. Q4 revenue almost doubled to $479 million, beating analyst expectations by a healthy margin. So while Twitter will probably never match Facebook’s near universal reach, the company has proven once again that its business model is working, albeit at a smaller scale.