Twitter's interim CEO "not satisfied" by user growth

Despite beating expectations (even their own!) for the second quarter results, Jack Dorsey, the interim CEO, has come out and said that he is “not satisfied” with the social network’s user growth.

On a conference call with investors, Dorsey said, “Product initiatives we’ve mentioned in previous calls haven’t yet had meaningful impact on growing audience and participation.This is unacceptable, and we’re not happy about it.”

Despite the social network posting revenues of $502.4m for the period ending 30 June, up 61% year-on-year and beating its own top forecast of $485m, the amount of active users has only increased by 8 million people, from 308m to 316m.

The majority of those new users have actually been from the company’s SMS fast users – i.e. people who use Twitter’s text alerts but don’t actually have a twitter account.

User growth has been one of Twitter’s more important KPIs in recent times, particularly when it was revealed that the company had concerns about whether people understood exactly why they should be using Twitter.

“We’ve got unbelievable brand awareness, but people are not clear why they should use it themselves,” said Dorsey.

After the results were posted, Anthony Noto, the chief financial officer, said that the company would launch a marketing campaign aimed at elucidating why people should use the social network.