Weibo (WB) wobbled in its stock market debut Thursday, but it didn’t fall. China’s largest microblogging service was up 11% in midday trading in the stock market today, but only after slipping at first, pricing at the low end of its range and selling fewer shares than expected. The IPO of the company called China’s Twitter (TWTR) priced at 17 late Wednesday, at the low end of its expected 17-19 range. And the stock opened at 16.27, though it
Twitter (TWTR) on Tuesday started rolling out new user profiles, as the company continues its push into new features that it hopes will attract more users. The new profiles — including one run by Michelle Obama’s staff — feature a layout noticeably similar to Facebook (FB) user profiles. When viewed on a desktop, Twitter users’ profile pictures have been shifted to the left, leaving room across the top of the profile page for large header images.
If Twitter (TWTR) wants to attract more users, it needs to make the torrent of messages posted on the social media site more manageable and useful to the average person. A survey of 1,100 current, past and non Twitter users by Deutsche Bank found that the microblogging service has a lot of work to do to satisfy existing users and attract new members. The results of the online survey were released Monday. On the plus side, engagement among current Twitter (TWTR) users is very high, Deutsche Bank Securities analyst Ross Sandler wrote. Nearly 50% of the active Twitter users, use the service more than once a day, he said. Reading about news events and discovering interesting content are the most common uses for the service among active users. About 84% of users post messages, or tweets, on the service. Among past users, 57% said they’d consider using Twitter again, Sandler said. Former users cited two key reasons for stopping Twitter use. First, Twitter lacked proper filtering capability for dealing with tweets. Second, they had difficulty in set up and finding useful information.