Companies that offer an IPO are typically young companies, or companies that have been around for many years and have finally decided to go public to gain market capital, in spite of the fact that IPOs are typically risky investments. Recently, social networks have been offering IPOs. Some of those sites include: Facebook, LinkedIn, Groupon and Zynga.

Twitter could soon join that list within the next year. The company is now valued at $11 billion, which could be due to a growth in users, coupled with rumors that Apple has taken an interest in the company. The last time Twitter carried a price tag was in 2011 when it was valued at $8 billion, which came around after the company’s $800 million round of funding.

According to Abram Brown, Forbes writer, Twitter is “getting better at making money.” Also, the company has a strong partnership with Pinterest and promoted tweets are targeted to the users who will actually click on the links attached to the tweets. Plus, photo sharing has been tweaked so that it is now able to compete with Instagram.

Unfortunately, IPOs are not as popular as they used to be. In fact, the IPOs of Facebook, Zynga and Groupon have lost value. In 2011, Zynga lost three quarters of its value after the company went public. Groupon’s price has dropped 81 percent since going public. The company was at $20 per share opening day. In spite of all the money investors raked in, Facebook has lost 26 percent of its value since the company hit the public market last may.

Facebook is the largest technology IPO on record and investors are most worried about the company’s ability to gain revenue from its mobile users. In a recent poll from PCMag staff, they were asked what they hope Facebook will and will not do in a post-IPO world. Twitter could actually benefit from the PCMaggers’ answers.

The Ability to search your own newsfeed

Let’s say you wanted to search a specific term, like “big data,” Facebook would bring up all status updates from you and your friends that used the term.

Rid the frigid privacy 

The whole point of social media is to share information. People seem to forget that and insist on making everything private, which completely defeats the whole purpose of social networking. Don’t be shy and share a little.

Never ask for money

In spite of the rumors about Facebook charging subscription fees, the company insists that the sit will remain free. Let’s hope it stays this way.

Greencrest’s Max Wolff said that although Twitter’s $11 billion cannot even stand strong next to Facebook’s $100 billion value, Twitter’s worth today looks better than Facebook did on its IPO price. Although Twitter’s worth is stronger today, will this still be the case in 2014, when the company plans to go public? All we can do is sit back and wait to see whether or not this will still be true.