Risky Business

For someone interested in social media, this is an exciting week for twitter supporters. Twitter will be debuting as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange, allowing people to buy stock in the company. This past Monday, the company increased the value of the stock from $17 to $20 a piece to $23 to $25 each. This indicates that the company has confidence in stock and that it will rise quickly.

There is some debate on this, however, because unlike other social media counterparts (Facebook or Linkedin) twitter does not have nearly as many people supporting the site, nor has it started turning a profit yet. There is great potential in twitter's following because the target age group is 18 to 29 years old. As these followers get older, they may continue using the social media site and with time the age group of the users will expand to an older audience as well.

USA Today used a statistic from pew research that stated on 16% of American adults use twitter and of those, a little over half use twitter for news purposes. I am not surprised that twitter is used as a news outlet, however, I am shocked that only 16% of American adults are making use of this social media site.

By making twitter a public company on the New York Stock Exchange so quickly, I feel like twitter is taking a huge risk. This could end up being a great opportunity for investors who put their trust in the company early and watch it grow as stock did for Apple years ago. Hopefully the potential of twitter is worth the risk.

According to ABC News, twitter has plenty of fans on Wall Street. Some people believe that twitter stock is worth $50 per share, which would allow investors to make a quick profit. Investing in a new market opens the investor up to countless opportunities.

Regardless of who is right, only time will tell the true impact of twitter in the economic world.