Here's Twitter's New Plan To Deal With Questions About Its Slowing User Growth

Since Twitter started publicly reporting quarterly earnings, it's been dogged by one persistent problem - user growth is slower than expected/wanted from investors.

Twitter's management has come up with plan to deal with antsy investors who are worried about monthly active users. It's going to start talking about other metrics to convince people that Twitter is a big mainstream product.

Yoree Koh at the Wall Street Journal reports, "When it reports second-quarter earnings on July 29, the San Francisco company is expected to unveil as many as four new metrics that it hopes will illustrate its reach beyond the 255 million users that log in at least once a month, according to people familiar with the matter."

Twitter, of course, is also working on a plan to ramp up monthly active users. But, that's going to take some time. So, in the interim, it will emphasize new metrics that "will measure the breadth of the audience that is exposed to Twitter's content but not logged in," according to Koh.

Twitter has been trying to shift perceptions for a while now.

On its last earnings call, CEO Dick Costolo tried to convince analysts that it actually reaches 1 billion people through its ad network. That's a much bigger number than its 255 million monthly active users. Costolo also said that people saw 3.3 billion tweets related to the Oscars on the company's earnings call. That's yet another way of trying to say Twitter is bigger than its 255 million monthly active users.

Neither of those messages have really caught on. So, Twitter is going to try even harder, it seems.

It's interesting timing for this shift.

We heard from sources that Twitter's monthly active users were on pace to dip during the second quarter, but the World Cup saved Twitter. Our sources are anticipating Twitter will only have 260 million monthly active users for the second quarter of the year. That would be a paltry 2% quarter-over-quarter growth.

With weak growth like that it makes sense to try new metrics.