Social media giant Twitter, which recently filed for IPO (Initial Public Offering) and hopes to raise $1bn from its public sale, is tipped to increase its 140-character limit in the not-too-distant future in a bid to improve its appeal among advertisers.
Social media giant Twitter, which recently filed for IPO (Initial Public Offering) and hopes to raise $1bn from its public sale, is tipped to increase its 140-character limit in the not-too-distant future in a bid to improve its appeal among advertisers.
Analysts are predicting that the seven-year-old company, whose documentation filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission reveals that it currently has 200 million active users who send 500 million tweets a day, could be worth up to $20bn after trading eventually begins (predicted around mid-end of November).
As reported by The Drum, experts believe Twitter will become more advertiser-friendly over the next couple of months, with the chief executive of financial information provider PrivCo, Sam Hamadeh, commenting: “Once it’s a public company, it has very demanding stockholders to meet and missing earnings or growth slowing – Wall Street has no mercy…You can bet they will punish Twitter for any misses and I think it’s inevitable they will loosen that 140-character limit. It’s not a sacred cow.
“They’re very short messages, very concise but for an advertising vehicle it doesn’t allow advertisers much room to really sell their wares.”
The company will be listed under the stock market symbol TWTR, and has not yet announced how many shares will be available, or at what price they will be valued.
Twitter is understandably nervous about going through with the public sale, after Facebook’s very public stock price plummet in the early days after it too filed for IPO.
Seeking to highlight its understanding of this, Twitter bosses said in the filing: “A number of consumer-oriented websites that achieved early popularity have since seen their user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously…There is no guarantee that we will not experience a similar erosion of our user base or engagement levels.”
Since going public, Facebook has introduced many advertiser-friendly options on its site, and many predict Twitter to eventually follow suit.
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