• by Sean Hargrave , Staff Writer, May 2, 2014

Mobile was always going to define the longer-term success of the social media giants Facebook and Twitter, and so it's no real surprise to see Facebook launch its Audience Network mobile in-app advertising network. The stakes are huge. Mobile advertising has hit a billion pounds per year in the UK alone, and worldwide is predicted by eMarketer to increased by 75% this year. 

Twitter was, of course, there first through the purchase of MoPub last autumn. It may put them half a year ahead of Facebook, but it's hard to see how Facebook won't go on to dominate. It has sheer weight of numbers with more than a billion and a half regular users on Facebook and WhatsApp, and so has an enormous pool of data on users worldwide. Sure, Twitter will reveal a lot about its 250m users from keywords in their profile, what they tweet about and which companies and individuals they follow -- but it can't compare with the depth of data Facebook has. The profile alone gives detailed age, location and opinion-based information that can be combined with "likes" to get a very rounded picture of every user. Follow that into the in-app network world and brands suddenly have a huge amount of data to use for targeting.

In fact, there was a very interesting privacy announcement from Facebook alongside the unveiling of the Audience Network. Third-party apps will no longer be able to glean details about a user's friends without each individual's express permission. This is not only a welcome privacy move -- it also means Facebook will continue to hold better data records than application developers. Make no mistake that the data about a user will still be collected -- it just won't be shared as easily with developers, leaving Facebook in a far better position.

So aside from the move leading more brands to use Facebook to get a user's email address, so it controls the engagement, the overall takeaway is that it's hard to imagine Facebook not dominating Twitter in in-app networking world through what will appear to be a more focussed audience that brands can tap in to with programmatic campaigns. 

There is a glimmer of light from Twitter, and I bet you it's one you'll see addressed in the next few months. The site's list function has the potential to allow advertisers to see what a user thinks of another, whether they are in their Top 50 media influencers or Top 100 Fitness Gurus. This could add a very useful extra layer of targeting because people may act differently in social media compared to real life. However, if you throw in validation around lists, there could be a way of cross-referencing what your data tells you about someone with what their peers say about them.

It's hard to imagine Facebook not dominating this space, alongside the platform owners Google and Apple -- but for Twitter, crowdsourced ratification of data for a top-level "platinum" targeting service may be a niche it could offer to stand out in a room full of thousand-pound gorillas.