Mark Zuckerberg Looks to Deliver Hit to Elon Musk With Upcoming Twitter Clone
Planned Meta microblogging app seen as a potential rival because of Instagram connection, company’s history
Social-media veterans and analysts see the planned app as a formidable competitor for Twitter, which has faced falling revenue and other challenges since Musk took over the company in October.
Meta, like other tech giants, has a record of copying features of competitors’ platforms and implementing them into its own services. The company is expected to build the microblogging app off its Instagram user data, a strategic maneuver that may help the app quickly gain users, people familiar with the matter said.
The competition between the two companies comes as Meta CEO
Mark Zuckerberg and Musk publicly discussed the possibility of
physically fighting each other.
Twitter didn’t comment.
Since
Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October, many Twitter users have voiced that they want an alternative. Over the past nine months, the company has experienced numerous
technical issues, removed
thousands of employees, lost users and advertisers, and was criticized for how the service moderates content. Musk last week took steps to limit how many posts users can see on the platform, saying he wanted to combat “extreme levels of data scraping.”
Startups such as Mastodon, Truth Social and Bluesky have gained users but have yet to emerge as a true rival to Twitter.
“I do think a new microblogging leader will emerge to supplant Twitter, but it is far from a foregone conclusion that the winner will be Meta,” said Steve Teixeira, Mozilla chief product officer and a former Twitter and Meta executive. Mozilla has criticized how large tech companies manage social media and has said the industry is “broken.” A lack of user trust might hinder adoption for Meta’s new app, he said.
There are signs that some of Musk’s changes are working. As of June, Twitter had as many as 850,000 subscribers of its Blue service, according to an estimate from Travis Brown, a Berlin-based software developer who tracks social-media platforms. Additionally, the company’s new CEO Linda Yaccarino
joined the company last month, bringing with her a strong network, credibility and reputation in the advertising industry.
Meta’s biggest advantage will be drawing upon its more than two billion monthly active Instagram users to launch its new app. It is unclear how broadly Meta will release the app upon its launch, but if even a fraction of its Instagram users try it out, Meta might be able to grow its microblogging app’s user base quickly. Twitter has 363.7 million monthly users, according to an estimate provided by Insider Intelligence.
More than 50 million mobile users in the U.S. use both apps, according to Data.ai.
“I’ve seen Meta do a very good job of picking up business models or product features and copy-pasting,” said Meghana Dhar, a former Snap and Instagram executive. “Haters are going to say that they lack innovation, but I actually think this is smart.”
The competition between Meta and Twitter comes as Mark Zuckerberg publicly discussed the possibility of a physical fight with Twitter’s CEO. Photo: Nick Wass/Associated Press
For 2023, Twitter is expected to generate $3 billion in advertising revenue, according to an estimate provided by Insider Intelligence. In 2021, the last year in which it disclosed annual financials before Musk took the company private, Twitter generated $4.51 billion in advertising revenue.
A Meta microblogging service should generate at least that much revenue, but there are a number of factors that indicate Meta could squeeze more, said Sayantan Mukhopadhyay, a Silicon Valley product manager who has previously worked at Meta,
Pinterest and Twitter. Meta has a larger userbase than Twitter, a deeper roster of advertisers and a more robust repertoire of advertising tools and products, meaning it should be able to show more higher-priced ads to a larger pool of microblogging users, Mukhopadhyay said.
“I think this platform can be a much bigger play than” Twitter, Mukhopadhyay said.
Meta has a history of successfully copying its competitors’ defining features and releasing clone products within its own social-media empire. In 2016, Instagram launched Stories, replicating a product found in
Snapchat. In 2021, Meta unveiled Reels, which is similar to the short-form videos found on rival TikTok.
The company is still ramping up monetization of Reels, but Stories now accounts for more than a quarter of Instagram’s worldwide ad revenue, according to Insider Intelligence.
Any Twitter-like product by Meta is likely to face an uphill battle. Although Meta will draw on Instagram data to launch its new app, the company will still need to get users to migrate to the app.
Meta will also need to get users to adopt a new type of behavior. Instagram has always been a visually driven social network, so Meta will have to get users accustomed to a text-driven medium.
Instagram has experimented with getting users to adopt that behavior when it launched a feature called Notes in December. That feature allows users to share short text blurbs with their Instagram followers.
“There’s a world in which that Notes feature was almost like an alpha test for this,” Dhar said. “Instagram is so primarily visual. They’re now dipping their toes into text.”
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