Why consumers want an MSN-phone more than a Twitter-phone

When INQ Mobile showed me a phone with a fast built-in Facebook app earlier this year, my immediate reaction was: “It’ll do Twitter, too, right?” Sure enough, the latest version does Twitter.
But it turns out that my enthusiasm puts me in a minority demographic. Americans asked by research and consulting firm Strategy Analytics what brands they would want on their mobile phone gave tweet-crazed San Franciscans a reality check: They placed Twitter just below MSN’s suite of Windows Live apps and far, far below Facebook.
I asked Strategy Analytics to take some time and come back with their explanation of why the two most popular social networks were so far apart in most consumers’ minds. Analyst Paul Brown says that despite Twitter’s hotness among Internet addicts and the media, we forget that it’s got only a fraction of Facebook’s user base.
“Twitter has approximately 55 millionusers, compared to around 325 million Facebook users,” he wrote me. “So while there is a high media buzz around Twitter, the number of users is considerably lower than either Facebook or MSN, thus the reason why desirability for Twitter is much lower.”
Why did MSN place just above Twitter? “For MSN, this was the whole suite of Windows Live services, including Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail,” Brown explained.
Hotmail, which has been around since before the first Internet boom, claims nearly 300 million users in 36 languages around the globe.
This shouldn’t be interpreted to mean that Twitter is not a mobile brand. It’s impressive that Twitter — and Pandora, too — placed above Amazon and CNN in the poll. But the real story is Facebook. The relative newcomer outranked Yahoo and nearly tied Google as the most desirable mobile service. Twitter, often spoken of in the same breath as Facebook, in reality has a long way to go to match it.
[Images: INQ Mobile and Strategy Analytics]