Twitter in 1Q15: Monthly Active Users Remain Elusive
Twitter Spooks Investors with 1Q15 Earnings (Part 4 of 5)
Twitter to add short message service followers to monthly active user base
MAUs (monthly active users) is an important metric for an Internet company. In the past, investors have criticized Twitter’s (TWTR) slow-growth approach toward increasing its MAU base. Twitter has now changed the way it measures the MAU base. Effective 1Q15, it started adding SMS (short message service) followers to it.
SMS followers are the users that have chosen to get tweet notifications via SMS. These are the followers that don’t have an Internet connection on their phones. These are typically the users that use feature phones in emerging markets (EEM).
Twitter believes these users will eventually graduate from feature phones to smartphones, and access the Twitter app on their own, which is why it’s adding them to its MAU base.
Twitter continues to face issues with its MAU growth
As the chart above shows, the growth of Twitter MAUs, including SMS followers, has remained in the single digits, despite the fact the company has a much smaller user base than Facebook (FB) does. There were 308 million Twitter MAUs as of 1Q15. In comparison, Facebook has a MAU base of 1.44 billion.
Twitter has faced a number of issues that have slowed down its MAU growth. In 3Q14, the implementation of an authentication measure negatively affected user growth in a number of Asia-Pacific countries. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, the authentication measure was an anti-spam measure that prevented Twitter users from logging on using the BlackBerry (BBRY) app.
Similarly, in 4Q14, Twitter said it lost about 1 million users due to the rollout of Apple’s (AAPL) iOS 8 smartphone operating system. Users either forgot their passwords or never bothered to re-download the Twitter app. Twitter lost another 3 million users due to an integration bug in Apple’s Safari mobile browser.
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