Twitter.  $1 Billion dollars.  TWTR – that’s the ticker. 

Those are the short facts that came out today about the much anticipated and highly watched public offering for the social media company.  As we look deeper at the story, a lot of interesting details were also disclosed with the filing of the S-1 form with the Securities and Exchange Commission – one of the steps to a public offering.  First of all – the company had $316.9 million of revenue for 2012 and is expected to do better than that this year, with the revenue hitting $253 million in the first six months of 2013.  That’s revenue – profit is something else.  The company lost $80 million dollars last year and through that same first six months of 2013, they lost $69 million.  Still, the service is incredibly popular, and they state 218 million users that are active each month as reported for the second quarter.  They also see half a billion tweets each day.

The patterns indicate a company that is growing, spending on capacity to keep up with massive growth.  Ostensibly, that $1 billion dollars to continue that growth pattern – infrastructure, operations, marketing, development – everything.  If you look at the revenue figure for 2012 it is nearly three times what it was the year before – an incredible indicator of growth.  Twitter also increased their marketing expenses year to year nearly three times as well.  Again – all part of a pattern of banking on growth, and there’s no reason to doubt that it will continue at this rate.

Social media has permeated throughout the culture, transformed information and is widely used around the world.  Twitter is a leader on this front and there’s not quite another service like it.  It has become an incredible marketing tool, a news source, an entertainment avenue, a chronicle for historic events and more.  Even more relevance is certified when you look at the fact that most of Twitter’s access is overwhelmingly mobile in nature – a sign of the times.  Few would have thought when this whole thing launched exactly what it would achieve today, but here we are at the dawn of a $1 Billion public investment.  We will soon see if the company can withstand the cycles and demands of Wall St. – with its focus on performance, leadership, profits, and shares.  Anyway, it is most interesting to see what makes Twitter tick, look around under the hood, now the public gets to take it out for a spin.