As Facebook prepares to go public in early 2012 and following LinkedIn’s $8 billion IPO this May, it seems Twitter is in no rush to join the stock exchange.
Dick Costello, CEO of Twitter, said last week the company has just raised “more money than I’ve ever seen before…$400 million.” He said the firm was able to do this on “very favorable terms” and it doesn’t “have to worry about questions like does this particular exogenous event have any influence on when we’ll be public.”
Twitter’s focus in the short to medium term is on its advertising business. The service revealed for the first time recently that it has over 100 million active users.
Twitter is ramping up its business to become a global advertising platform. It offers promoted tweets, promoted trends and promoted accounts but at present these can only be bought from its US sales team.
Twitter has set up shop in the UK and has been negotiating with a number of key brands, including Sky, O2, Vodafone and Sony as well as negotiating with the major media agencies.
Brands can pay for a tweet to appear in a user’s timeline, to promote their account and to pay for topics to appear as ‘trends’. The ads people see will be based on their followers and in this way can be more targeted. The cost of the ads is said to be ‘a six figure sum’.

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