Last Thursday, Facebook introduced a redesigned news feed that makes it easier for users to access and read what they want.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s news stream continues to provide users with an unfiltered fire hose of information. Drilling down is limited to users’ creation of Twitter lists, and the #Discover tab.

So what are the implications for Twitter of Facebook’s revamped news feed?

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Twitter’s influence on television is well-documented – it’s now very unusual for any prime-time television program not to actively encourage at least one hashtag (shows like The X Factor have several) for fans to use whilst watching the show – and the bigger TV events can easily generate tens of thousands of tweets per second.

Moreover, and especially during live events, broadcasters will often “check the reaction on Twitter” for an immediate response.

Conversely, the major networks rarely push or advocate the use of Facebook during their programming, nor do they load up the world’s most popular social network to see what’s happening during live shows. All of which, according to the latest data, might be a mistake.

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Facebook and Twitter will continue to battle it out online – and although Facebook is still solidly in the lead as the place where businesses find more consumer interaction, Twitter isn’t too shabby either.

Here’s some additional support to share with your company when you try to tell them why tweeting in the New Year is essential - and getting on Facebook (if you aren’t there yet), makes sense too, of course!

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There’s no such thing as “better than” or “worse than” when comparing social media platforms.

Each one serves different purposes and is more effective at certain things. Each one has different impact and influence in different areas.

But certainly, there are points of comparison worth considering in evaluating daily time spent on social media. There are only so many minutes in an hour, and only so much time saved by social media aggregator tools like HootSuite, CoTweet and TweetDeck.

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Yesterday we wrote about a rumour in the New York Times that proposed that Twitter is soon going to add photo filters to its platform to allow it to compete with Instagram, the photo-sharing social network that was acquired by Facebook back in April. The Times suggested that Twitter was finally learning a lesson from Facebook; namely, “if you can’t buy it, build it”.

Well, it appears Facebook might have learned a lesson of its own, too, as the tipoff from the Times has led to them rushing out an update to their official Facebook apps on the iPhone and iPad, and, while it wasn’t mentioned in the release notes, it’s the camera functionality that has seen the biggest change.

Specifically: it now has Instagram-style photo filters.

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A survey of 7,700 teenagers in the U.S. has revealed that Facebook is still the social network of choice amongst the younger demographic, followed by Twitter and Instagram, says a new study from Piper Jaffray.

While Facebook’s stock continues to stagnate following it’s lacklustre IPO, Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster says that the company remains “well positioned to maintain its spot as the top social network despite competition from Twitter”.

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Yesterday, Facebook announced that there are now more than one billion people actively using the social network each and every month.

Those same folks have contributed an incredible 1.17 trillion Likes, 219 billion photos and 17 billion check-ins.

Amazing numbers.

So, here’s the big, obvious question: has Facebook peaked?

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The following is an excerpt. The complete article, available in our Facebook Marketing Bible, includes more key differences between Twitter and Facebook, Twitter mistakes to avoid, and how to optimize your marketing strategy for the two platforms.

Facebook is not Twitter, and Twitter is not Facebook.

For veteran users of both platforms, this statement is well understood. But for marketers and brands new to either network, or for those with an extensive level of experience in one but not the other, the differences are not immediately apparent.

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Vincenzo Cosenza has been updating his World Map Of Social Networks since June 2009, which tracks the dominant social networks on a country-by-country basis, according to data received from Alexa and Google.

Cosenza has just published his latest infographic and, as you would expect, the social world is dominated by Facebook. In fact, it’s always been dominated by Facebook, so much so that the total number of social networks represented on the map has shrunk from 17 in June 2009 to just nine today. And Twitter isn’t one of them.

But it’s not all bad news for the bird, as additional data from Cosenza confirms that Twitter is now the number two social network on the planet.

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This is a monthly series that looks at visitor data for all the major social networks as calculated by Compete.com. Compete is USA-biased, and certainly in the case of Twitter the visitor numbers are distorted by the openness of Twitter’s API and the numerous Twitter software clients, but on a like-for-like basis the numerics have value and warrant investigation. Please refer to previous installments in this series for a more detailed overview.

New visitors to Twitter.com rose by just +1.07% for the month of April for a total of 21,514,898, with overall visits to the site falling by an eyebrow-raising -18.11% (147,418,997).

* Month-on-month, overall visits to the site are down some 33 million. We might have to take this with a pinch – Compete, who seem to be getting slower-and-slower to release data each and every month, had overall visits to Twitter for March at 161,903,421 the last time I wrote this report, and they’ve now changed this number to 180 million. If the former is correct, it’s still a pretty big drop, although nowhere near as serious.

However, Twitter.com has clearly reached a ceiling that requires something special to break through – possibly the extra functionality that @al3x hinted at before he moved on to pastures new.

Or, perhaps this is the beginning of a ‘topping-out’ process that could see more users – new and established – moving away from the Twitter home page towards desktop and mobile clients in greater numbers? The sharp decline in visits this month would indicate that this is already happening for veterans.

One wonders how many of these old-hands the iPhone – and possibly the official Twitter for iPhone app – have picked up and converted.

Meanwhile, Facebook added 2.53% of new visitors (135,375,036 visits) and +15.70% overall (3,165,316,934), which obviously contrasts sharply with Twitter.

We’ll have to look at next month’s data to see the full picture for Facebook, but at the moment it would appear that not only are people not leaving the network over privacy concerns – they’re actually more eager to sign up.