Twitter’s monthly active user base, unchanged from the previous quarter, is being closely watched to see if it connecting with more people and keeping pace with other social networks.
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In a letter to shareholders released Wednesday, when Twitter reported its fourth-quarter earnings, Dorsey outlined for the first time his strategy for the company’s future.
Investors were also disappointed in Twitter’s revenue forecast for the first quarter of 2016.
A key metric used to analyze the growth of social media companies, total Monthly active users (MAU), was 305 million during the fourth quarter, down 2 million users from Q3.
The company is moving forward, confident that “disciplined execution” will result in growth, but for months now it’s been treading water, and even sunk a bit.
Twitter said it had an average of 320 million monthly active users in the fourth quarter, the same as in the previous quarter. They also outlined a few ways they are looking to improve the experience on Twitter, and that January was already improving.
Twitter Inc made a dramatic product change on Wednesday, saying it will recast the way it displays tweets on its homepage by customizing them to individual users, instead of uniformly displaying tweets in reverse chronological order.
“We have some really weird rules… that just nobody understands”, Dorsey told analysts on a conference call, mentioning Twitter’s arcane punctuation requirements for replying to messages. Excluding certain expenses, Twitter earned 16 cents per share during that period, surpassing the expected earnings of 12 cents per share.
The weak results are likely to stoke investor concerns over stalled growth, which a series of initiatives since the return of founder Jack Dorsey last summer have failed to reverse.
Has Twitter hit a wall?
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However, Twitter isn’t throwing in the towel yet (of course), and has some plans to address the more confusing bits of its service. The company brought in $6410 million in advertising revenue during the quarter, up 48 percent year over year. He’s also exploring allowing more than 140-character tweets – Twitter’s signature and some fans say best aspect, in a Facebook-like morph that could fall flat.
