‘What marketers should know about Twitter’s Q4 2016 earnings’ – Marketing Land
Tim Peterson says, “Twitter’s fourth-quarter earning report wasn’t all bad. It was just a lot of bad, with some good and a bit of ugly.
The Good
The product changes Twitter has made over the past year, like adding an algorithmic mini-timeline, appear to be working. The platform’s monthly audience may not be growing by much, but it’s still growing. More importantly, its daily audience growth is accelerating.
In the fourth quarter of 2016, the average number of people using Twitter daily rose by 11 percent year over year, marking the third straight quarter that the growth rate increased. In Q3, it was up by 7 percent; in Q2, it was up by 5 percent; and in Q1, it was up by 3 percent.
In addition to getting more people to use Twitter each day, the company is getting people to use Twitter more. In Q4, the amount of time people spent on Twitter increased “by double digits on a year-over-year basis,” as did the number of times people came across a tweet, according to the company’s letter to shareholders (PDF).
Twitter is counting on maintaining this audience growth in order to get its advertising business back to growth. Yes, “back.”
The Bad
Twitter didn’t only lose its longtime ad boss in the fourth quarter of 2016. It lost ad revenue. The company’s total advertising slipped by less than 1 percent year over year”.
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