SAN FRANCISCO — For months, the question facing Twitter has been what its fate will be.
The company that popularized the 140-character message has been the subject of takeover discussions that soured, with suitors like Salesforce.com turning tail. Some thought a partial intervention from private equity would help buy Twitter time to turn itself around. Twitter has also considered layoffs and divestitures of certain businesses in an attempt to refocus and reinvigorate its growth.
When Twitter reported its third-quarter results on Thursday, an answer started to emerge.
The company said it planned to cut 350 jobs, or roughly 9 percent of its global workforce, the beginnings of an attempt to revamp the company and become profitable. The earnings also showed budding signs of progress, as user growth and revenue rose more than Wall Street had anticipated.
At the same time, Twitter began paring back businesses it no longer viewed as central. The company said it would discontinue the mobile app Vine, the six-second video sharing application that Twitter acquired and introduced in 2013. While Vine gained early traction with young users, the app did not reliably make money.
Twitter posted revenue of $616 million for the quarter, up 8 percent from a year ago and above Wall Street estimates of $605 million. Its net loss narrowed to $103 million, or 15 cents a share, besting Wall Street’s estimates of 19 cents a share.
Twitter’s users increased 3 percent from a year ago, to 317 million, and over the latest quarter, it added 4 million more users, which was slightly more than analysts had expected.
“We see a significant opportunity to increase growth as we continue to improve the core service,’’ Jack Dorsey, the chief executive of Twitter, said in a statement. “We have a clear plan, and we’re making the necessary changes to ensure Twitter is positioned for long-term growth.’’
The results, largely positive compared with Twitter’s history of quarterly earnings over the last three years, showed the beginnings of alleviating a declining path for the company. Since the company went public three years ago, it has been haunted by its inability to attract new users, especially when compared with Facebook, the social networking giant that hosts more than 1.7 billion regular visitors each month.
Twitter has undergone a string of executive departures and a revolving door of company leadership. Dorsey, a Twitter founder, returned last year to lead the company, but critics are concerned that he is not moving fast enough. Twitter has added 10 million users since his return, and the product has not changed as drastically as some hoped.
Instead, Dorsey has taken a more methodical approach — one that has received mixed reactions internally — and opted to make small changes to how tweets are composed and consumed. In previous interviews, Dorsey has said many of these small changes are long overdue and accretive to overall user growth.
Other changes, like staff revamping and job cuts, will most likely ease pressure from investors over time. This round of layoffs — the second since Dorsey’s return last year — will focus on slimming down the sales and marketing teams across the organization. Robert Peck, an analyst with SunTrust Robinson Humphrey, said he expects that such companywide layoffs could save the company more than $50 to $100 million annually.
Much of Twitter’s current turnaround strategy is based on attracting new users with live video content, including “Thursday Night Football’’ games broadcast on Twitter in a deal with the National Football League. Such deals highlight Twitter’s ability to provide news and commentary to millions of people in real time.
