In case you hadn't heard, Twitter has something of a user engagement problem. In its Q4 2013 earnings results, the social network reported that whilst user numbers had grown overall, both the total number of timeline views and the number of timeline views per active user had sharply decreased, as shown below.
Some commentators are putting the decline down to all the user interface changes that have been brought in since the IPO, but regardless of the reason what it essentially means is that my, your and everyone else's tweets are not being seen as much as they were. In Q4 2013, the average user made 613 timeline views - or 6.7 per day, down from 7.4 per day in Q3. That's a 10% less chance that our tweets will be seen (and probably more given that the number of users has increased).
And that's why Twitter's user engagement problem is yours as well: you are going to have work even harder to get your messages across. No wonder then that Twitter's advertising revenues increased by over 40% in the final quarter of last year. Perhaps this downward trend is just a cunning ploy from Twitter to get brands spending more of their advertising dollars with them?