Twitter on Wednesday reported better-than-expected performance for the first quarter which sent shares soaring more than 10 percent. Twitter’s revenue in the first quarter reached $548 million, or $0.11 per share – well ahead of the $511.9 million and $0.01 per share Wall Street was anticipating. That still translates to a decline of roughly eight percent year-over-year but topping analysts’ expectations is always good news.
Perhaps even better news for the sluggish social network is the fact that it added nine million monthly active users to its community, bringing its total user count to 328 million. Experts were expecting the company to finish the period with just 321 million monthly actives.
That’s not exactly a small number of people but it pales in comparison to the nearly two billion people that use Facebook, the 700 million that are now on Instagram and the 500 million over on Microsoft’s LinkedIn.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said the accelerated growth and improved user engagement is a result of a number of changes they’ve made recently. Examples include deploying machine learning to show users more relevant tweets, rolling out product improvements at a faster clip and making it easier to reply to tweets. Cracking down on abuse has also had a positive impact, we’re told.
Shares in Twitter are currently trading at $16.02 after beginning the day around the $14.68 mark.
https://www.techspot.com/news/69104-twitter-added-nine-million-new-users-first-quarter.html
