Twitter soars after World |Cup scores

Twitter’s shares have soared after it scored by tweaking its tweets service to capitalise on interest in the World Cup, including more prominent placement of photographs.

As a result between April and June it halted a slowdown in user growth with investors reassured its popularity had not peaked.

After the online messaging service reported the number of monthly active users rose by a better-than-expected 24 percent, the value of the company’s shares shot up by 35 percent on Tuesday .

But some analysts remain cautious saying the jury is still out on whether it can become an internet platform on the same scale as Facebook.

Arvind Bhatia, who works for Sterne Agee, said: “You have to look maybe at what happens in the next quarter and see if they can continue to have upside on the user growth.”

He noted: “The expectations going in had become quite low. Even in the US their performance was good. For now, that will put to rest some of the concerns about US growth.”

Before this quarter Twitter has been battled to reverse a steady decline in its once-heady expansion pace. Expectations had subsided ever since the company stunned Wall Street in February with disappointingly low user growth.

Twitter saw users increase to 271 million, still dwarfed by rival Facebook’s 1.3 billion.

Timeline views, a measure of the engagement of its users, also exceeded expectations with a 15 percent increase, far outpacing the roughly 8 percent expected.