Twitter shares on the slide

Twitter shares under pressure. Picture: John Devlin.

Social media giant Twitter unveiled revenue totalling $711 million (£542m), showing an increase of 24 per cent for the second quarter.

However, shares tumbled in Wall Street pre-trading by as much as 20 per cent, as the company disclosed a drop in the number of average monthly active users to 335 million, down by one million compared with the first three months of the year.

This is still an 11 per cent rise from the same quarter of 2017, when the platform had an average of 326 million users actively using the site each month.

Likewise, fellow social networking site Facebook suffered losses on Thursday after revealing financial results falling short of expectations and warning of decelerating revenue.

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said: “Our second quarter results reflect the work we’re doing to ensure more people get value from Twitter every day. We want people to feel safe freely expressing themselves and have launched new tools to address problem behaviours that distort and distract from the public conversation.

“We’re also continuing to make it easier for people to find and follow breaking news and events, and have introduced machine learning algorithms that organise the conversation around events, beginning with the World Cup.

“These efforts contributed to healthy year-over-year daily active usage growth of 11 per cent and demonstrate why we’re investing in the long-term health of Twitter.”