Twitter Inc, is holding its inaugural strategy day in San Francisco today, with senior executives selling the company’s plans for growth to Wall Street analysts. Last week marked the company’s one year anniversary since its IPO, and to say that it has been a wild ride since then would be an understatement. Pressure has been mounting on CEO Dick Costolo to articulate a clear vision for its future.
Today certainly seems like a step forward in that process. Shares in Twitter are soaring after the company for the first time quantified its indirect user base: Twitter claims there are there are 500 million users who encounter Twitter properties each month, but aren’t actually logged in to the service (think of all the people who view tweets in news articles, for example). That’s nearly double the company’s current active user base, which stood at 284 million at the end of the last quarter.
The subtle message being sent is that Twitter is not as puny relative to Facebook (which has more than 1.3 billion active users) as a strict user base comparison implies.
Anyway there were lots of announcements and news from the presentation today. Here is a brief summary, fittingly, in tweet form