This is the latest in a series on major tech companies’ earnings for Q1 2014. As with the others, I won’t aim to be comprehensive, but rather to pull out some key figures and draw some conclusions from them.

As with Facebook, I borrow Twitter’s own three-part approach to growth to gauge these companies’ potential, in a sort of scorecard. In each case, I try to use the metrics the companies themselves provide in these three categories: user growth, engagement and monetization. Below is my growth scorecard for Twitter:

The biggest difference between Facebook and Twitter in this regard is engagement. Whereas Facebook’s measure of engagement (DAUs as a % of MAUs) is rising globally and in all regions, the main metric Twitter offers – timeline views per user – is falling. Now, there’s apparently a good reason for this – Twitter changed the way certain features work in its mobile app, and that led to fewer timeline views recorded for similar levels of engagement. But as long as this is the (only) metric Twitter consistently provides to measure engagement, it’s going to get beaten up over it. Continue reading →