Twitter posts another quarter of falling user growth

Twitter Inc posted another quarter of falling user growth, sparking a shares sell off, putting pressure on chief executive officer Dick Costolo to prove that he could attract more users and advertisers, Bloomberg reported.

Active members on the social network had risen 23 per cent to 284 million, according to the statement of the San Francisco-based company yesterday.

That compared against an increase of 24-per cent in the prior period and comes in the wake of at least a dozen quarters of slowing growth.

''It's the number that we delivered into the market and it's our number one priority,'' Costolo said in an interview following the earnings announcement. ''We have an aspiration to build the largest daily audience in the world.''

Reaching that goal would require the micro-blogging network to quadruple its audience to challenge Facebook Inc's audience of over 1.32 billion people.

The company had replaced executives and unveiled new products this year as he sought to reassure investors that Twitter, which went public in November, had room for growth.

The company was focused more intensely on mobile advertising and services for other application developers, as it sought to move away from reliance on its main website to generate traffic and ads.

Meanwhile, according to Nate Elliott, an analyst at Forrester who studies social media, the lack of growth was due to Twitter's relative lack of innovation, The New York Times reported.

Costolo, too, had said he wanted the company to innovate more quickly.

''We have to continue to grow our monthly active users and make it increasingly a daily use case for them,'' he said during a webcast with investors to discuss the financial results. ''It's more critical than ever to increase our overall pace of execution.''

In an interview, Costolo also emphasised the long view. He added microblogging service, which consists of a stream of 140-character messages, was trying to provide something useful to three very different audiences - the daily Twitter user, the casual visitor who visits the site through a web search or the home page, and the person who simply views a tweet embedded in a news article or app.

''You want to create scalable experiences that work for all kinds of different users,'' he said.

The company said in its financial report, 284 million people logged into its service at least once a month, in the third quarter, up 4.8 per cent from 271 million in the second quarter.

However, the number of new users during the three months was less than in the first or second quarters.