Twitter's user base shrinks as revenue growth beats expectations in Q4

Twitter's revenue although grew faster than expected, recording a 95 percent jump to 479 million dollars during the October to December period, yet the growth rate could not permeate its user base which shrink considerably during the period.

The growth from last quarter was significantly slower as the micro-blogging platform added just four million users in the past three months, reported the BBC.

Twitter tried to explain the sluggish growth by saying that it lost about four million users during the period as a result of integrating various third-party applications.

The total number of monthly active users was 288 million, marking a 20 percent increase over last year.

However, Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo allayed fears about user growth by saying that the trend in the first quarter indicated that the total number of net users added in the quarter will be similar to "what we saw during the first three quarters of 2014.