Twitter IPO: Smart Move or for the Birds?

Twitter finally let the tweet out of the bag a few weeks ago when it acknowledged its confidential upcoming IPO, and ever since, the old Twittersphere has been chirping with opinions. There was talk of the IPO coming in the new year, but now it seems like Twitter, which is looking to raise about $1 billion, could go public as soon as Thanksgiving time.

While there’s been some debate as to what the IPO means for investors—the hype machine’s in super overdrive—Ben Fu, a partner at Next World Capital in San Francisco, says the Twitter IPO is a great opportunity for marketers. Twitter’s recent acquisition of mobile ad exchange MoPub in particular is clear evidence that Twitter’s looking to provide advertisers with better access and targeting capabilities against a user base of about 200 million people, says Fu.

And if Twitter’s IPO is a success, it’ll have hefty amounts of cash to throw at future adtech acquisitions.

“If I were a marketer, I would expect to see exciting things come out of Twitter as it blazes the trail in mobile marketing,” says Fu, who notes that the key to Twitter’s growth once it goes public will be a continued investment in its ad platform. You’ve got to keep those investors happy.

Twitter’s clearly courting advertisers—but it’s a two-way street. Marketers also have to embrace the shift from traditional media to online and mobile.

“Marketers will need to think how best to adjust their ad content and marketing goals for shorter videos as well as accommodate for mobile screens and interactivity,” says Fu. “From the mobile perspective, we are in the early chapters of Facebook and Twitter dominating the mobile-first world that’s just ahead of us.”

And now, what would a blog post about the Twitter IPO be without a collection of random embedded tweets collected from around the Web? See below.

The frequency of promoted tweets has started to increase to the point of annoyance. Anything to do with #TwitterIPO?

— Arvind Narayanaswamy (@arvindnswamy) September 22, 2013

As soon as Twitter IPO we have seen the peak in the social media stocks. Time is ticking to sell. Anyone remember 99? Can u say bubble. POP

— Brandon Romanek (@brandonromanek) September 23, 2013

Twitter’s IPO playbook can be summed up in five words – Do the opposite of Facebook: http://t.co/MH9QVn2ScG

— Social Media Insider (@SocialMedia411) September 17, 2013