Twitter CEO Dick Costello

Twitter is doing well financially, but their current growth in registered users has been a bit disappointing.

That’s according to Twitter’s Q3 Earning Report, which shows that the social network has seen less than 5 percent growth in new users in the last quarter, a number that has left investors unimpressed.

Twitter currently has over 284 million monthly active users, which are the people who consistently log in and tweet. But the active users make up only a small percentage of the overall number of people reading the tweets.

In a conference call to discuss Twitter’s Q3 report, CEO Dick Costolo outlined Twitter’s audience as a “series of geometrically eccentric circles,” with the smallest circle being the monthly active users, the mid-sized circle being the “hundreds of millions” of users who visit Twitter without logging in, and the largest circle being the people who read embedded tweets or newsfeeds from blogs and other websites.

Twitter’s User Base

Costolo outlined a three-part process intended to grow Twitter’s active users, saying:

I’m confident in our ability to build the largest daily audience in the world, over time, by strengthening the core, reducing barriers to consumption and building new apps and services.

Costolo plans to strengthen and grow the core active user base by improving the new user experience, providing better media tools, and adding better functionality to the direct messaging system so that users can move between public and private conversations seamlessly. Costolo said he wants to draw in users who will log in and tweet “every day.”

He also wants to eliminate any barriers to use and make Twitter as accessible as possible. This includes creating an easy to follow timeline for new users without the need to know anything about who is already on Twitter or how it works.

Lastly, Costolo wants to facilitate the Twitter app-building process, and he made special mention of Twitter’s new developer toolkit called Fabric. Costolo said: “We believe Fabric can be the one SDK that any global app developer needs to embed in their application.”

Although it may not have added as many users as it would have liked, it’s hard to argue against Twitter still being relevant when everyone, from A-list celebrities to the queen of England, uses its service.