Facebook has continued its massive run-up in its stock price today, this time blowing past $50 — which means it has more than doubled in the past three months.
When Facebook reported its earnings at the end of July, it essentially revealed that it had figured out a mobile advertising business — which was the single largest question for the company after it went public. Concerns about Facebook's mobile advertising abilities were what drove the stock down from its IPO price of $38 to less than $20.
This is good news for Twitter, which essentially has to follow the same principles: Create a massive mobile platform and find ways to monetize it through advertising. Twitter's main method of doing this is through Promoted Tweets — with the analogue for Facebook being mobile newsfeed ads. While its mobile-ad business barely existed at the beginning of the last year, 41% of Facebook's advertising revenue now comes from mobile advertising.
In its most recent quarter, Facebook's results with regard to mobile far exceeded anyone's expectations, with more than a third of Facebook's total monthly active users now checking the site at least once a day on their mobile devices. Of Facebook's 699 million users that check the site every day, 469 million of them do it on their mobile devices.
This gives Twitter, which revealed this month that it had already filed to go public confidentially with the SEC, another wave of positive sentiment to ride as it heads into its imminent IPO.