Twitter announced yesterday that it’s going public. The announcement was done in a format that best suited the micro-blog’s service: posting a tweet to its 24 million followers. The offering was the most anticipated initial public offering since Facebook’s IPO last May. 

 

While Twitter will likely follow the footsteps of Facebook by transforming its website into an advertisement-filled virtual network, it may not receive the same success as its social media counterpart. The reasons are twofold. First, Twitter only has half as many users as Facebook with 500 million registered users and 200 million active users. (Facebook has 1.1 billion users and 618 million active daily users.) This makes Twitter less attractive to brands as it creates barriers for advertisers to promote their products and services to a large audience. Second, Twitter has a lesser user usage time duration than Facebook. According to comScore’s 2013 U.S. Digital Future in Focus report, 5 out of every 6 minutes spent on social networks are spent on Facebook. This further decreases Twitter’s appeal to advertisers as it limits brands’ opportunities to showcase their ads to consumers. 

 

Read the whole article at CBC News.