Facebook 'playing catch up to Twitter on mobile adverts'

Facebook is playing catch up to Twitter when it comes to effective mobile adverts, according to digital agencies and brands.

Twitter has revealed that is it now generating most of its revenues from adverts seen by its users on mobile devices rather than from commercial messages on Twitter.com.

However, the story for Facebook is the reverse, with the social network having issued a revenue warning over its mobile growth and it lack of capacity to monetise the small screen, just last month.

According to Angus Wood, the group director for paid social media at

iProspect, a leading British digital agency whose clients include General Motors (who withdraw all advertising from Facebook last month) and Nokia, Twitter has a significant head start on Facebook as its advertising platform was ‘built for mobile from the off’.

“Twitter never created a specific advertising space but allowed people to pay to promote their tweets on the existing service. It baked the commercial part of its venture into the service from the off. And also the Twitter.com experience is nearly identical to that of the mobile app,” he explained.

“However, Facebook created a traditional display advertising media platform – in a similar vein to Yahoo and MSN - which doesn’t easily translate to mobile.”

Twitter's president of global revenue, Adam Bain, told The Wall Street Journal: "We know that mobile is how people access Twitter, it's where people are overall, and we know it's where the business is.”

A US web company, eMarketer Inc has estimated that Twitter will generate $259.9m advertising revenues this year, up from an approximated $139.5m in 2011.

Wood said companies such as Fox Movies had experienced major success with promoted tweets, such as the company’s recent high profile promotion of Prometheus, the latest Ridley Scott film – and that Twitter was brilliant for promoting real-time events.

However, he warned not to write Facebook’s mobile efforts off.

“Don’t underestimate Facebook. So far there are only sponsored stories which allow brands the chance to advertise on the mobile app. I am sure they will come up with something which can allow them to monetise their huge reach. Twitter is still a much smaller and typically younger and digitally savvy crowd…Facebook attracts everyone but it needs to get its mobile advertising plan started,” Wood explained.