By Yoree Koh 

Twitter Inc. executives on Wednesday laid out their long-term strategy at the company's first analyst day, attempting to counter mounting investor concerns about the company's growth prospects and vision.

Speaking at San Francisco's Four Seasons Hotel, the executives spoke at length about each part of the company's business, mainly advertising and data licensing. They also for the first time disclosed specific initiatives they plan to ease investors' long-time worries.

While Twitter Chief Executive Dick Costolo has said on recent earnings calls that the company aims to "build the largest daily audience in the world," he has provided few details on how the social-media service, with one-fifth as many users as Facebook Inc., planned to get there.

For its core service, which has had five leaders in as many years, Twitter unveiled several features and changes to make the service easier to use and more valuable for its audience. The changes include the ability to upload and share videos, beefed-up private messaging capability, more-targeted notifications, better use of location and a "while you were away" feature that will highlight relevant tweets a user missed while offline.

New users, when they first sign up, will no longer have to go through the painstaking process of picking other users to follow in order to see Twitter content. Instead, the company will do that for them, delivering what Mr. Costolo called an "instant timeline." He said the company will take everything they know about a new user when they sign up to build a "high-value" feed right off the bat.

"Moving forward, you can expect us to accelerate the pace and breadth of product change," Mr. Costolo said.

He added that the company is "working toward creating a Twitter that everyone in the world can get value from immediately. A Twitter that connects everybody to their world."

Investors liked what they heard, sending the company's shares up 7.5% Wednesday to $42.54. The stock has fallen 37% this year.

Chief Financial Officer Anthony Noto underscored the company's strategy and touted its strengths. He mentioned three objectives: to strengthen the core audience of users; to reduce barriers to consuming Twitter content across the entire audience; and to deliver new services and apps to attract new users.

"They're doing all the necessary things, or at least talking about all the necessary things about product and marketing," said RBC Capital Markets analyst Mark Mahaney, who attended the presentation. "But at the end of the day, when it comes to the stock, all of this needs to translate into reaccelerating user growth and growing engagement per user."

Mr. Noto, who emceed most of the all-day event, read out Twitter's new strategy statement, which he conceded was a mouthful: "Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue-generating Internet companies in the world."

"I struggle to read it every time," he said.

The company gave analysts a better idea of its size, which it considers to be a combination of three separate groups: its core users, which totaled 284 million in the latest quarter; visitors to the website or app who don't log in; and those who see Twitter content embedded on other websites or apps.

Mr. Noto said more than 500 million people come to Twitter a month without logging in. About 200 million view a profile--of a celebrity like Lady Gaga, for example--but more than half navigate away. Another 100 million per month view individual tweets, but 70% of those visitors immediately leave the site. Aside from those visits, tweets that are embedded on places other than Twitter get an estimated 185 billion views per quarter, Mr. Noto said, a new metric the company has started to measure to indicate the size of its reach beyond core users.

Twitter executives said they are working on ways to get people to sign up when they visit Twitter pages, such as by offering more content related to what the user is viewing. For example, visitors who go to pop star Katy Perry's profile page might stick around longer if more music or information about similar artists were available, said Trevor O'Brien, a director of Twitter product management.

On a slide that showed Internet companies like Google Inc., Amazon.com Inc. and eBay Inc. whose annual revenues have reached $14 billion, Mr. Noto placed Twitter, with a goal of reaching that mark within 10 years of hitting the $1 billion level.

Mr. Costolo stressed the importance of bolstering Twitter's private-messaging function, an area in which Facebook and other Internet companies have gained strength.

"I strongly believe private-messaging virality is important to our long-term growth," Mr. Costolo said, adding that Twitter will begin changes in messaging this quarter.

He said the company also will look to invest in separate apps, as it has done with Vine, an app that lets users share short video clips. Facebook and others have adopted this sort of multiapp strategy over the past year.

For Mr. Costolo, Wednesday was a chance to show critics and investors that Twitter was on track with a clear plan after its rocky first year as a public company, with a raft of executive departures and confusing signals from the service. Though the company had initially focused on its core user base, it later said analysts should consider visitors to the site and those who see Twitter content elsewhere as part of its audience. Twitter's situation was complicated by signs that its user growth rate was beginning to stall.

Mr. Costolo has lost or replaced five executives in the year since Twitter's initial public offering. Operating chief Ali Rowghani abruptly resigned in June. The following month CFO Mike Gupta was demoted to lead a newly created strategic investments group. He was succeed by Mr. Noto, a former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. banker who had worked on Twitter's IPO.

An indication of how far the company has to go was on display Wednesday, however, when an analyst in the audience admitted he created an account that morning after hearing the encouraging talking points, but then became frustrated when he couldn't figure out how to follow certain interests, such as tech and finance.

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