What The Twitter IPO Means for You and Your Tweets

Sept. 13, 2013 — -- Twitter's announcement yesterday that it has filed for its IPO, or initial public offering, has prompted two types of responses.

The first comes from the investor or financial type who asks all the economic and valuation questions. The second response comes from the average Twitter user who asks some variation of "Uh, why do I care?" or "Does this matter to me?"

Yes, More Advertising

When Facebook went public, potential investors were worried about its advertising revenue, especially on mobile devices. It will likely be the same for Twitter, which takes in an estimated $582.8 million a year in advertising.

Right now advertising appears in your Twitter stream through what the service calls sponsored tweets. Companies or Twitter account holders pay to promote tweets so they appear in users' streams and don't sink to the bottom.

"The question on the minds of experts, investors and users alike is whether or not going public will force Twitter to increase revenue by injecting more ads into the stream. The answer is yes," Brian Solis, a principal analyst at Altimeter Group, told ABC News. However, Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo is focused on not allowing those ads to interrupt the user experience too much, Solis said.

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"Twitter ad sales will grow because Twitter will grow. With recent and upcoming acquisitions, Twitter will make its platform more approachable by big brands and small businesses alike," Solis said, while emphasizing that the company will "keep user experience at the forefront to protect the social chaos that defines Twitter's beloved stream." Other analysts that ABC News spoke to said the same thing about Twitter wanting to preserve the user experience it has worked so hard to maintain.

Mobile and User Experience Improvements

Those same analysts also bring up the importance of mobile and the moves Twitter might make to its apps to keep its users engaged more on their phones and tablets. Just last week Twitter began testing an updated version its Android app and The New Yorker's Matt Buchanan reports that two new versions of the Twitter iPhone app are in development.