Twitter says that it is focusing on being a “healthier” platform for all rather than targeting user growth at all costs after revealing that active users decreased in June compared to the first quarter of the calendar year.
Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, oversees the social site which is a popular outlet for brands with multi-platform content marketing strategies. These users will be pleased to hear that 335 million active users still log on to read and watch content every month. That figure is slightly lower than the 336 million users who did so in early 2018.
Twitter, like Facebook, has been dogged by fake news scandals during the last 18 months and has since refocused its efforts on improving discourse on the platform. Dorsey told investors that this initiative had led to scores of fake and offensive accounts being purged, which is likely to have contributed to the user drop off.
Facebook had a week to forget after its stocks plummeted on the back of a poor quarterly report and growth guidance. Twitter has a battle on its hands to keep its head above water in the coming months, and Dorsey said that a clean-up may help its “growth story” in the long term.
Twitter’s new vision has reportedly found favour with brands and advertisers that are eager for more transparency and safety in the social media sphere. Twitter said that it generated $711m in revenue during the second quarter, a 24% increase year-over-year, with the bulk of that figure coming from ad revenue.