© Reuters. Twitter Shares Surge After User Growth Impresses

Investing.com - Twitter shares rallied in pre-market trade on Thursday, after the social media company reported impressive user growth numbers, while beating estimates on both the top and bottom line for the third quarter.

Twitter posted earnings of 10 cents per share and revenue of $589.6 million compared to expectations of EPS of 6 cents and $587.5 million of revenue.

Average monthly active users was 330 million for the quarter, up 4% year-over-year and compared to 326 million in the previous quarter.

The company also announced it had to readjust monthly active users all the way back to the fourth quarter of 2014 because it had accidentally counted users of a third party app service as its own.

Monthly active users is a key performance indicator for social networking services - typically calculated by taking the number of users who have logged in and logged out during the 30-day period.

"This quarter we made progress in three key areas of our business: we grew our audience and engagement, made progress on a return to revenue growth, and achieved record profitability," said Jack Dorsey, Twitter's CEO.

Shares of Twitter (NYSE: ) traded at $18.80, up 9.6% from Wednesday's closing price of $17.14.