Why Facebook Beat Twitter

This is the second essay in our series of 10 Lessons From 10 Years Of The World’s Most Innovative Companies.

I’ll admit that in the early days, I really didn’t get Twitter. Facebook was intuitive for me: a way to connect with my friends, my family, my colleagues. Twitter just seemed kind of . . . vague. But I eventually got with the program and saw the power in a new kind of broadcast medium. In Fast Company’s 2012 World’s Most Innovative Companies issue, both Facebook and Twitter were ranked in the top 10, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey was on the cover. (Mark Zuckerberg had been on the cover in 2010.) At that point, there was still talk that Twitter could be a billion-user platform.

The next year, though, neither Facebook nor Twitter made our Most Innovative Companies list. It wasn’t that we suddenly dismissed them. But they each had failed—at that point—to adapt themselves in a leading way to key growth challenges. As deputy editor David Lidsky wrote in a special commentary, “Both companies have turned their focus away from users and toward shareholders to get bigger, not better. Revenue is great, but not at the expense of the product.”