Twitter to curate new timeline experiences in a bid to speed up user growth

Twitter is stepping up the development of new timeline experiences as it looks to gain new users and accelerate the growth of its lapsed user base, as user growth continues to slow quarterly.

Twitter’s user growth was just 1.4% quarter on quarter in the last three months of 2014. Twitter’s user base grew by 6.2% in Q2 and 4.8% in Q3.

In the next couple of weeks the group is looking to create an immersive experience around the Cricket World Cup to boost engagement, which will emulate the FIFA World cup last summer, with one difference. People without Twitter accounts and smartphone users will now be able to access the feed.

In addition, the platform looks to further engage users through its ‘instant timeline’, released earlier this week.  ‘Instant timeline’ will appear on the social network’s homepage and show people that are not signed-up, curated tweets that are accumulated through algorithms.

The service will also stretch to logged-in users who have stepped away from the service for a few hours. The service will highlight a summary of the best tweets accumulated after the user has stepped away from their screen.

Speaking during a conference call, Dick Costolo Twitter’s CEO said that one of the brands core objectives for 2015 will be to “remove barriers to consumption”.

While the platform’s revenue was healthy this quarter, with ad revenue reaching £432m, an increase of 97% year-on-year, it has struggled with gaining new users.

The lack of growth has led to the brand to partner with third-party sites such as Flipboard to improve reach beyond its user base. It was also announced this week (5 Feb) that it would partner with Google so that tweets will appear on Google search, drawing in more viewers.

The company was put under the spotlight when Instagram surpassed its user base with 300 million followers. Twitter currently has 288 million followers, according to its latest earnings release.

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