NEW YORK (AP) — You’d think Twitter would be able to milk its status as President Donald Trump’s megaphone. But the company still faces stagnant user growth, has never made a profit and even reported a quarterly revenue decline Wednesday, a first since going public.
Trump’s frequent tweets ricochet well beyond his 28 million Twitter followers. Anything he tweets can serve as fodder for social media, TV news shows and, often, late-night comedy. Analysts say Twitter’s user engagement — how often people respond, retweet or ‘‘like,’’ for instance — likely benefited from ‘‘political discourse’’ in the first quarter.
The problem: The people already on Twitter may well be using it more, but America’s first true ‘‘Twitter President’’ hasn’t inspired others to sign up for Twitter en masse. This could well be because they don’t have to. Thanks to Twitter’s public nature, anyone can read Trump’s posts (or any other posts as long as they are shared publicly, they don’t need an account to do so).