Twitter’s shares continued to climb Friday, a day after the social network reported fourth-quarter sales that beat Wall Street’s expectations despite slower user growth.
The company’s stock was up more than 16 percent to $48 per share by Friday morning, a sign that concerns about whether the social network can attract more users could be easing, some analysts noted Friday.
Twitter’s officials have been trying to convince investors that their audience is much larger than the number of monthly active users. People see tweets when they’re embedded in websites, mobile apps or Web searches and the company recently struck deals with Flipboard, Yahoo Japan and Google.
On Thursday, the company reported sales of $479 million in the fourth quarter, compared to $242 million during the same period last year. That beat the $453 million in sales analysts on average surveyed by Thomas Reuters expected the company to report.
But its user growth slowed compared to previous quarters with about 288 million people logged into the service at least once a month in the fourth quarter, a slight uptick from 284 million users in the fourth quarter.
“The user growth story remains murky in our opinion…and we expect questions to persist on the trajectory of this metric’s growth,” wrote Daniel Salmon, an analyst for BMO Capital Markets in a note today.
Photo credit: Twitter headquarters in San Francisco. AP Photo/Jeff Chiu
