Shares in Twitter have jumped sharply, after the social media platform reported an increase in users and progress in its efforts to reduce malicious posts.

The company, which has been investing in improving the user experience, beat market expectations with an 18 per rise in revenue to £609m ($787m) in the first three months of the year compared with the same period in 2018, as reported by Sky.

Following the news, shares in the company rose by 16 per cent.

Twitter said advertising sales, 18 per cent up on a year ago, accounted for the bulk of the revenue increase - with video ads making a significant contribution.

Twitter said its 'monetisable' daily active users - users exposed to advertising on a daily basis - rose to 134 million in the three months, which represents a 12 per cent increase.

The company said it remained profitable, despite an increase in operating expenses, as it has hired more staff to deal with abusive behaviour on the site.

Twitter said it is taking pressure off victims and aiming to take action before abuse is reported. It said it is now removing 2.5 times more tweets that share personal information. Over a third of the abusive tweets that are taken down every week are being proactively detected by machine learning models.