Here's How Twitter Reacted to the Twitter IPO News

Last Thursday Twitter announced that it had filed for its IPO, meaning the company has plans to go public in the near future, but just how did Twitter’s user base react to the news?  Overall, the reaction from Twitter was positive according to Mashwork, a social insights firm.  Mashwork monitored a two-day period, Thursday and Friday (of last week) to understand just how people on Twitter were discussing the impending IPO and here’s what they found.

Within the two-day period, Twitter users posted over 93,000 IPO-related tweets, with the original tweet receiving more than 14,000 tweets and over 3,400 favorites.  What’s interesting is that if you look at those numbers compared to the two-day period for the Facebook IPO announcement in February 2012, which received over 110,000 tweets, it paints an interesting picture.  Despite Facebook having over 1 billion users at the time of its announcement, it only got 17 percent more tweets than Twitter did for its announcement, which has 1/5 of the user base.

This could be due to the fact that Twitter has a more “hardcore” group of users that really care about the service or it could just be the nature of the beast.  After all, Twitter is known for its ability to break news with a single tweet that goes viral.

According to Mashwork, most of the conversation was neutral in nature, driven mostly by buzz and news coverage.  However, the largest volume of tweets, excluding neutral link sharing tweets, consisted of people positively reflecting on Twitter tweeting the news or positive sentiment about the timing of the announcement.  And let’s not forget that the announcement came a day after Mark Zuckerberg famously told Twitter not to be afraid of going public at TechCrunch Disrupt SF and just as Facebook’s stock price has been steadily rising.

However, despite the positive sentiment associated with Twitter’s IPO news, the analysis found that only a paltry 2 percent (when looking at data excluding neutral tweets) of Twitter users want to purchase the stock. While a lot of the conversation surrounding the IPO was positive, the negative conversation that made up less than 1 percent of all Twitter IPO conversation came from people who were unhappy with recent changes (such as the blue line linking conversations), or thought investing in Twitter would be a bad idea and questioned the company’s profitability.

You can see the complete Mashwork break down/analysis below.  One thing that stood out to me was the amount of people who were curious about Twitter’s financials, which likely is a result of the company filing its S-1 confidentially.  What do you think of these numbers?

* Numbers may not equal 100% due to rounding.