78% of Twitter's monthly active users are tweeting from a mobile device

On Tuesday afternoon, Twitter released its earnings report for the first quarter of 2014. The 140 character messaging app now has 255 million monthly users. Of those users, 198 million are accessing the service from a mobile device. That means that 78% of Twitter users are tweeting from a smartphone or tablet. While the vast majority of Twitter users are using a mobile device, the growth in mobile subscribers is actually in a downtrend.

Back in the early days of Twitter, when most of the public thought that they needed to park their car to visit an app store, quarterly growth of mobile users of Twitter ranged from 10% to 33%. The five quarters from Q1 2012 to Q1 2013 saw pretty steady growth of mobile users, with a quarterly gain of about 10.5% for those five periods. Over the last four quarters, mobile growth has declined again. From the second quarter of 2013 through the first quarter of this year, Twitter has seen a sequential gain in mobile users ranging from 3.9% to 6.9%.

What does this decline mean for Twitter? It would seem that the company will have to find a way to drive new mobile users. Twitter admits that it previously had a hands-off attitude toward growth. "Growth was something that happened to us," said CEO Dick Costolo. But now, Twitter will have to start adding features, designed at attracting more mobile users. 


source: TechCrunch