Will Twitter suffer the same fate as Facebook?

A look into how Twitter compares to Facebook and how this affects the success of an IPO

By: Matt Smith, Staff Writer

When the Facebook IPO went public in May of 2012, it was considered be a massive flop. Twitter plans on releasing its IPO this November and many critics believe it could suffer the same fate as Facebook. Twitter claims it won’t and here are some possible reasons why:

Mobility

Twitter has capitalized in the mobile phone realm while Facebook has not.

A Wall Street Journal blog reports that “70 per cent of Twitter’s advertising revenue was generated from mobile devices, up from more than 65 per cent for the June quarter.” This is a sharp contrast to that of Facebook which only garnered 41 per cent of ad revenue from mobile devices.

When Facebook first went public with its IPO it barely tapped into the mobile network market. This attributed heavily to the downfall of the release. On the other hand, Twitter has excelled and looks like it will continue to over the next few quarters.

Open to developers

As Facebook grew, it slowly began closing its doors to third party developers. When Facebook went public, Mark Zuckerberg promised equal opportunity for all developers. Within months the idea was abandoned and Zuckerberg began restricting what developers could do. Many critics claim that this is a primary factor in the failure of the Facebook IPO.

Twitter is promising to be different.

In his lengthy blog post regarding the future of Twitter, Michael Sippey, VP of Product at Twitter, said that Twitter “wants developers to be able to build applications that run within tweets”.

Looking to the release

Being able to look at the mistakes Facebook made allows Twitter to learn and make better decisions. Twitter is still a growing company that has not reached the same release numbers as Facebook has. Compared to Facebook, it looks as though Twitter has a better chance of success.

Matt Smith is a freelance writer who is currently studying politics at Queen’s University. He has an interest in current affairs and the Toronto Maple Leafs.

Photo courtesy to lanereport.com & businessinsider.com