Business

Twitter IPO: No truck with Zuck

Twitter is unfollowing the Facebook IPO playbook.

The initial public offering is still months away, but Job One for the popular social-networking service company is to avoid flopping like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook.

The mega-microblogger is expected to file papers with regulators — hitting “go” on the countdown to a public offering — before the end of the year. As The Post reported yesterday, bankers are already meeting with Chief Executive Dick Costolo.

Insiders said company has learned from Facebook’s mistakes leading up its much-ballyhooed — and ultimately botched — IPO. Here are a number of safeguards Twitter is planning:

* Prepare well in advance: The company has implemented policies to restrict early shareholders and employees from selling their stock on private markets. One insider said punitive measures were devised to discourage such trading.

Facebook shares traded privately for years, juicing the stock price and pressuring the company to meet those targets when it went public. For the first year, the public markets didn’t support Facebook’s private valuation.

* Timing is everything: It plans to go public when it’s still in its hyper-growth phase. This year, revenue is expected to more than double, according to eMarketer data.

Facebook went public at a time when revenue started hitting seasonal bumps and it was making the rocky transition from the PC desktop to mobile devices.

* Size matters: Twitter is looking to avoid the huge share float that hurt Facebook’s IPO. Its rival sold 15 percent of the stock and flooded the market with so many shares that it undercut demand.

Professional networking site LinkedIn, which has grown steadily higher since its 2011 IPO, sold less than 10 percent of its shares in its offering.

Twitter, which was founded in 2006, is still honing its pitch to investors and the general public. Although it isn’t raking in billions in advertising, the company will tout its more than 200 million users as a selling point, sources said.

“People are going to be surprised by how far Twitter’s reach is,” said a source close to the company’s board of directors.