Twitter Inc losing Monthly Active Users

The social media network Twitter proved to show good revenue numbers of $513 million but failed to keep its user growth balanced and disappointed its investors with trading of below $30 a share.

According to a report in the Business Insider, the monthly active users (MAUs) at Twitter rose 15% annually to 316 million since it went public in 2013 whereas, as predicted by Dick Costolo, former CEO at Twitter Inc., the monthly active users (MAUs) should have been at 400 million by the end of 2013.

Twitter had initially launched its instant timeline and logged out features earlier this year. On a conference call the Interim CEO at the social network Jack Dorsey stated that the new instant timeline and logging out features have failed to attract audience and has not increased any sort of participation on Twitter and that he is not happy about it. Jack Dorsey and the CFO Anthony Noto realize where the problem is. In comparison to the other social media websites like Facebook, Twitter is in need to create an experience that appeals to active users.

According to analysts, since the first quarter 2015 the increase in monthly active users (MAUs) is 8 million, of which 6 million are SMS Fast Followers, who are users interacting with Twitter via text messages. If this number is eliminated from the actual figure of 8 million then monthly active users (MAUs) have barely increased from 2 million users.  Chris Sacca, in a recent post has mentioned that over 1 billion people had registered on the social network but hardly anyone of them stuck around, he added that out of 100, 85 new active accounts are inactive. In addition to this, 5% of the monthly active user accounts (MAUs) on the network are spam accounts.

The social media website’s main concern should not only be to increase the number of monthly active users (MAUs) but also retain the current users. Introducing the instant timeline and logging out feature on the network neither proved to attract more people nor did it manage to retain the current user database. The essential thing to do right now will be to work on the growth of active users and Twitter developers can work on their mass  marketing strategy that will not only get new users but encourage the inactive users to come back.

Along with its negatives, Twitter’s positives shouldn’t be overlooked by its investors. The social media website’s revenue rose 61% in the last quarter annually. Twitter is thought to grow via Twitter ads since users tend to finish videos on Twitter as compared to Facebook.