Wall Street likes the tune Twitter is chirping, as the social networking's revelations of upcoming improvements and untapped potential earned its stock a bump.
Twitter's stock closed at $42.52 per share, a $2.95 increase, and was still climbing after CEO Dick Costolo offered a peek at the social network's hand to attendees at the company's first day for financial analysts in San Francisco.
As an indicator of the company's health, Costolo says Twitter is preparing to step up the speed and frequency of updates to its site. Some of the first features to spill down that streamlined pipe will be improvements to Twitter's private messaging systems and enhancements to its news feeds.
"I strongly believe private messaging virality is important to our long-term growth," Costolo said.
Along with better facilitating private exchanges, Twitter is also looking to improve the public spaces with an instant timeline.
"[During] any sort of local events, national events, global events, the opportunities for people, participants, and those watching the event to be live tweeting those things and broadcasting to the world what they're seeing is a massive use case," said Costolo.
During the conference, Twitter also revealed that it will extend its video services beyond the reach of Vine and the video service's six-second loops. Christian Oestlie, vice president of product management at Twitter, indicated that the company was to go as far as hosting live video streams.
While Twitter's stock has been riding down a midyear peak and been stagnant in the larger picture, the social networking site likely rekindled confidence in investors when its top brass moved from discussing the company's plans to revealing its potential. Twitter attracts 284 million active users each month and draws 500 million users who don't log in with the same frequency.
"Prior to now, our strategy only allowed us to focus on that audience of 284 million users, and not the audience of 500 million users that already exist on our platform," said Anthony Noto, Twitter's chief financial officer.
Those 500 million logged-out users who visit the site each month represent a lucrative opportunity for Twitter to continue its growth, but that figure also points to a problem. Twitter is failing to entice hundreds of millions of people to log in and move beyond the celebrity profiles that brought them to the site in the first place.
To make Twitter more inviting, the company is working to streamline profiles and deliver content users want to see. Much like Facebook's enhanced News Feed, Twitter hopes its instant timeline will effectively recommend content to get people to log in and keep coming back.
"We are creating an entire new framework for helping new and struggling users learn the basics of Twitter," said Kevin Weil, vice president of product.
