In Twitter’s ideal world, heads of state around the world flood its struggling social media platform with their every thought and feeling, just like Donald Trump.
It’s a convenient vision for Twitter, which just boasted its strongest user growth in a year. Twitter’s monthly users increased by 9 million (or 6%), to 328 million, in the first quarter of the year compared to a year ago. Its daily users increased by 14% in that same time period (the company doesn’t share its total daily active users).
While the company won’t attribute the boost to the new US president’s social media missives, one of its executives suggested to Bloomberg in an interview that Trump’s prolific usage was a good model for other leaders, and for its business. “We’d love it if every world leader used Twitter as their primary mechanism to talk to their constituencies,” Anthony Noto, Twitter’s chief operating officer, said. “The more that happens, the better we are going to be at showing what’s going on in the world.”
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Trump’s Twitter love, which played an integral part in his presidential campaign, has lasted through the first 100 days of his presidency. He has used the social network to bully foreign governments, threaten companies, and accuse his predecessor, Barack Obama, of tapping his phones.
These tweets are no doubt a big part of the “new and resurrected users following more news and political accounts” that Twitter noted in its earning presentation last week.
But it will take a lot more than one bombastic account to fix all that ails Twitter, which hasn’t had a profitable quarter in the three years since it went public.
Sluggish user growth has weighed on company revenues, which fell by 7.8% to $548.3 million in the first quarter, partly due to an 11% drop in ad sales. Like many tech companies, its problem likely comes down to a limited user base. While the platform is a vital tool for media, politics, and entertainment, everyone else seems drawn to more digestible forms of social media. There are only so many 140-character ramblings the average person can take–even the ones that come from Trump.