Twitter User Growth, Shares Surge Following 2014 FIFA World Cup

Microblogging site Twitter Inc. on Tuesday posted strong results across the board on the second quarter.

The company made a revenue of $312 million in its second quarter due to more usage of Twitter during the 2014 FIFA World Cup.

The San Francisco-based social-media company's shares rose 35 percent after hours to $49.62, after touching its first day closing price at $44.90 per share. The surge added around $7 billion to its market value on Tuesday.

"Even in the U.S. their performance was good. For now, that will put to rest some of the concerns about U.S. growth," Reuters quoted Sterne Agee analyst Arvind Bhatia.

"One would still have to say that the jury is still out. 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," Bhatia added.

Expectations had subsided ever since the company surprised investors in February with a disappointingly low user growth. Before Tuesday's gain, the company had lost 40 percent of its market value since the start of 2014.

According to Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Twitter still stays unprofitable by recording a loss of $144.6 million. As the company is hiring more employees and is backing out costs, such as stock compensation. Analysts have expected further losses.

But weeks of World Cup matches helped surge the second quarter results of Twitter. The company enjoyed a boost from the sporting showpiece in Brazil.

Twitter recorded a surge in users to 271 million, however, it is still lagging behind by Facebook Inc, which has 1.3 billion users worldwide.

However, Chief Executive Dick Costolo said in a conference call with analysts on Tuesday that though the World Cup led existing users to spend more time on Twitter, it did not contribute to raise the number of users.

According to the Twitter page of 2014 FIFA World Cup, people have posted 4889 tweets, 1566 multimedia photographs with videos, with the page having 2.95 million followers so far.

Twitter is still an entrant in the mobile world, compared to Facebook. The microblogging website is expected to collect a larger bite of mobile-advertisement revenue this year at 2.8 percent, versus its previous earning of 2.4 percent last year, according to eMarketer data released before Twitter's report on Tuesday.