Who remembers Friday, May 18, 2012? That date didn’t carry the same weight as D-Day, 9/11, women’s right to vote, Pearl Harbor, etc., but in the digital world, it was very significant. 

It was the day that Facebook (FB) became a publicly traded company. Back in 2012, FB was still experiencing massive growth, despite the rise of Twitter and Pinterest. If you wanted a no-brainer investment, then buying FB stock was your easy route to early retirement, or so they said. 

On the first day of trading, FB stock hit a high-water mark of $45-a-share. By the end of the day, the price fell $3.82 per-share. That downward trend continued over the next weeks and month, despite the IPO initially raising over $16 billion.

Not even a month after its first offering, FB investors had lost a combined $40 billion. 

So what did we learn from FB going public? That it is great to be first inline to buy tickets, but not if you are buying tickets to ride the Titanic. 

Five years after the FB fiasco, another huge social media entity, Snapchat, has gone public. Today was the initial opening (and it was a lot cheaper than FB’s) at around $17.

Stocks are a great investment tool, and here at MAXtech, we are by no means financial advisors, but as the saying goes, “If you don’t learn from history, you are destined to repeat it.” Perhaps waiting a few weeks or months until the stock price settles would be the best time to buy. 

From the digital side, MAXtech will be monitoring how going public will affect the social platform. Advertising on social media has presented a massive opportunity for ROI for our current customers and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. The key is to be one of the first companies in your industry to take advantage of a new advertising platform. 

If you have questions about social media advertising or just want to see some conversion numbers related to ad spend, MAXtech will send you some pretty glaring stats: marketing@maxtechagency.com 

Social platforms continue to grow—make sure your business keeps up.