Twitter Shares Slide After Disappointing Earnings

By Krishnadev Calamur

Published April 28, 2015 at 5:02 PM CDT

Twitter's release Tuesday of its disappointing earnings in the first quarter was pre-empted by four tweets from a financial services company.

#BREAKING: Twitter $TWTR Q1 Revenue misses estimates, $436M vs. $456.52M expected
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

#BREAKING: Twitter $TWTR Q1 Average Monthly Active Users (MAUs) 302M inline with expectations
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

#BREAKING: Twitter $TWTR Q1 Mobile Monthly Active Users (MAUs) misses estimates, 241.6M vs. 243M expected
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

#BREAKING: Twitter Inc. $TWTR Q1 Non-GAAP EPS beats estimates, $0.07 vs. $0.04 expected
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

The tweets from Selerity caused Twitter's share price to slide ; trading in its shares was halted.

Selerity, in a subsequent tweet, said:

Today’s $TWTR earnings release was sourced from Twitter’s Investor Relations website https://t.co/QD6138euja. No leak. No hack.
— Selerity (@Selerity) April 28, 2015

As NPR's Laura Sydell tells our Newscast unit, Twitter's official results disappointed Wall Street. The social media site continued to bring in new users, but its ad revenue didn't measure up to expectations. Laura says:

"Twitter's revenue actually rose over last year by nearly 75 percent. But that didn't keep Wall Street analysts happy. Twitter isn't getting new users as quickly as other popular social media companies but it has made a lot of money from the users it has. The company has about 302 million users — whereas Facebook has nearly a billion and a half. Still Twitter has a fraction of 1 percent of the digital ad market. Facebook has 8 percent and Google has more than 30 percent."

Twitter shares were down 18 percent at the close of trading Tuesday.