One Wall Street tech analyst says he knows Facebook, that he follows Facebook and that Twitter is no Facebook.
The analyst, in a report Friday addressing Twitter’s disappointing user growth numbers last quarter, said he feels it’s time investors realize that Twitter is to Facebook what radio is to television.
“I’m not knocking radio,” the analyst, Brian Wieser of Pivotal Research Group, told The Post of his eye-catching analogy.
“But to have used Twitter is to know that it’s not for everybody,” he said.
Like radio, Twitter “fills a consumer niche,” Wieser said.
On Feb. 6, Twitter shares fell 24 percent after it reported slowed user growth in the fourth quarter compared to the third quarter.
Twitter shares gained back 8.6 percent on Friday to close at $54.35 a share.
The shares had nearly tripled in price in their first six weeks of trading.
In the wake of the disappointing fourth-quarter results, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo vowed to grow the micro-blogging service into a product as ubiquitous as Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook, which boasts 1.23 billion monthly active users compared to Twitter’s 241 million.
The underwhelming Twitter results came in its first quarterly release since it went public last fall.
Growth in the fourth quarter came in at 3.8 percent — quarter over quarter — after rising 6.4 percent in the third quarter.
In a Feb. 5 conference call, Costolo said Twitter’s goal “is to reach every person on the planet.”
The CEO also said Twitter is launching a number of initiatives this year to make the service “accessible and valuable to everyone.”
Currently, average, non-famous users — the non-Justin Biebers of the world, those who don’t have 49.4 million followers — have made an effort to build up a stream of followers by tweeting short messages that attract attention.
Facebook, by contrast, provides even the most average person with an automatic audience of friends and family.
In the call, Costolo said that Twitter is seeking to connect new users to existing contacts to “drive higher interaction from Day One.”
Costolo also promised to do a better job of organizing Twitter’s content for users along topical lines.
Now, users read messages from the people they follow on chronological lines, which can be overwhelming and make it tough to find relevant tweets.
Wieser, who thinks Twitter’s stock should be $34 a share, thinks Costolo would be wise to accept the company’s niche status.
Twitter currently has enough users on a unique platform that it could grow revenues to $5 billion by 2018 simply through selling more ads, Wieser said.