It’s been a rough year for Twitter. Fueled by doubts about the company’s growth and profit potential, Twitter’s shares plummeted by more than 60 percent in the past 12 months, shaving $20 billion off the company’s valuation.
And the bad news keep rolling in: Morgan Stanley lowered its price target to $16 a share in a note published on Thursday. The analysts quote Twitter’s weak user engagement and lackluster user growth as the main reasons for their downgrade.
According to comScore data, an average user in the United States spent less than 3 minutes a day using Twitter on mobile devices in the fourth quarter 2015 – Facebook sees 10 times that engagement, as our chart illustrates. To make things worse, Twitter’s mobile engagement has been declining for seven straight quarters until the end of 2015 and supposedly continued doing so in the first three months of 2016.