Skip to main content

    Twitter stock nosedives after it reports sluggish revenue growth

    Twitter stock nosedives after it reports sluggish revenue growth

    /

    User growth returned to double digits

    Share this story

    Twitter http://www.flickr.com/photos/kevinkrejci/8427949301/

    Twitter just can’t win with investors. Every quarter it seems to miss expectations on either its financial metrics or its user growth. This quarter it reported that its daily active user count was up 11 percent, the first time in a year it had a double-digit increase in this category. But its revenue growth came in at just 1 percent, a far cry from the 48 percent year-over-year growth Twitter reported during the same period in 2016. Investors hammered the stock in pre-market trading, sending shares down more than 10 percent.

    Twitter attributed the improvement in its user engagement metrics to product tweaks, marketing, and “organic trends,” which might be shorthand for President Donald Trump, whose Twitter feed has world leaders and ordinary citizens checking the service on an hourly basis. User growth metrics hit a high around the election.

    “We also saw continued, strong double-digit engagement growth on a year-over-year basis across Tweet impressions and time spent on Twitter in the fourth quarter and we expect this momentum to continue,” the company wrote in its letter to investors.

    The company recently took a number of concrete steps to combat abuse on its platform, including filtering low quality or harassing tweets out of user’s timelines. It also swapped out its Moments tab for an Explore feature that combined Moments, trends, and search.