Citizens has reiterated its Market Outperform rating for Meta Platforms Inc. (NASDAQ: META), maintaining a price target of $900.00 and pointing to sustained engagement gains on Instagram as a key justification for its view.
Meta's market capitalization stands at $1.71 trillion and the company is trading with a price-to-earnings ratio of 29.05, currently near its 52-week high. Citizens analyst Andrew Boone emphasized Instagram's recent usage trends as central to the firm's optimism.
According to Boone, global time spent on Instagram has expanded by 18% year-over-year or faster over each of the past six months, with January posting a 19.2% year-over-year increase. In the United States, time spent growth has been at least 16% year-over-year across the same interval, with January registering 16.5% growth compared with the prior year.
Those engagement metrics notably outpace Instagram's user-count growth. Citizens noted global monthly active users rose by 6% year-over-year, while U.S. MAU growth was 2% year-over-year. The gap between higher time-spent growth and more modest MAU expansion indicates that existing users are spending substantially more time on the platform.
Citizens presents that trend as supportive for Meta's engagement strategy and as a potential underpinning for revenue expansion, since stronger per-user usage can translate into improved monetization. Meta's reported gross profit margin is 82%, and InvestingPro assigns the company an overall financial health score labeled as "GREAT," while indicating that Meta appears slightly undervalued relative to its Fair Value. InvestingPro also lists 11 additional tips for META investors and offers a Pro Research Report with further analysis.
Separately, Meta released fourth-quarter 2025 financial results that beat consensus expectations. The company reported earnings per share of $8.88, above the forecasted $8.19, representing an earnings surprise of 8.42%. Revenue for the quarter reached $59.9 billion, exceeding the projected $58.35 billion.
Following the quarterly results, Freedom Capital Markets increased its price target for Meta to $825 from $800 while retaining a Buy rating. Freedom Capital Markets attributed the raise to strong holiday-season demand and improvements in advertising efficiency driven by AI.
Meta has also been active on product and partnership fronts. The company entered a trial arrangement with Allegro.eu SA to surface selected advertisements on Facebook Marketplace, a move that could broaden cross-platform ad distribution. Internally, Meta's next-generation large language model, codenamed Avocado, is reported to be delivering promising early outcomes according to an internal memo.
Together, these engagement metrics, financial results, and product developments form the basis for the continued positive stance from Citizens and the target increases by other market participants. That said, the company remains priced near its 52-week high as investors weigh the implications of higher user engagement, steady user-count growth, and evolving monetization vectors.