Twitter announces latest loss

Twitter stocks have dived today (February 6th) after the company announced another loss in its latest financial results.

The firm is still yet to make a profit and revealed that it made a net loss of $645 million (£396 million) for 2013, despite floating on the New York Stock Exchange last year.

It was also announced by Twitter that it averaged 241 million monthly users in the last quarter of the year, which was an increase of just 3.8 per cent on the previous three months.

In after-hours trading in the US, stocks in the company plunged by almost 18 per cent on the back of the news.

Twitter has found it hard to monetise its service despite an increasing number of promoted tweets being purchased by both individuals and brands. In contrast to social networking rivals such as Facebook, Twitter does not show display advertisements.

"Twitter finished a great year with our strongest financial quarter to date," said Dick Costolo, chief executive of Twitter. He added: "We are the only platform that is public, real-time, conversational and widely distributed and I'm excited by the number of initiatives we have underway to further build upon the Twitter experience."

User data

Mobile monthly average users was revealed by the company to have reached 184 million in the fourth quarter of 2013, which it stated worked out as an increase of 37 per cent year-over-year, representing 76 per cent of all total monthly average users.

"Twitter made its platform more accessible to a broader range of advertisers by launching its self-serve advertising platform to small and medium-sized businesses in the UK, Ireland and Canada," added the firm in a statement.

It also noted that a number of new product enhancements, which included "media forward, in-line social actions, Twitter Alerts, custom timelines", helped to improve its overall user experience during the course of 2013.

Twitter also rolled out the function whereby users can send pictures to each other via direct messages. A similar innovation has been unveiled by Instagram in recent months.

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