When asked in a recent interview about his advice for Twitter's possible IPO, Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg joked that he would probably be the "last" person one would want to ask on "how to make a smooth IPO."
Zuckerberg and Facebook went through one of the rockiest public offerings in recent memory thanks to a number of factors: too many shares offered at too high a price, significant last-minute downward revisions to ad revenue projections and major glitches on the NASDAQ during the first minutes of trading. The end result was that Facebook only traded above its IPO price once during its entire first year.
See also: Twitter's IPO Filing: What It Means
Twitter's leadership team probably won't choose to follow Facebook's IPO playbook — Zuckerberg is right about that — but they will likely be very mindful of avoiding Facebook's many mistakes.
"Facebook was the first of its kind in terms of the hype and the ubiquity of it," Santosh Rao, an analyst with Greencrest Capital, told Mashable. "Twitter has enough to go by: they know what to do and what not to do."
Rao and other analysts we spoke with expect Twitter will attempt to control expectations for its IPO by introducing fewer shares at first, keeping the share price down and placing tighter restrictions on people selling off stock on the private market. Rao said he previously heard that Twitter placed a cap on how many shares individuals can sell on the private market.
"They've learned from the Facebook disaster and have managed to control the frenzy around it," he said.
Indeed, recent reports suggest Twitter's IPO playbook could be summed up with five words: Do the opposite of Facebook. Facebook chose Morgan Stanley as its lead banker with mixed results; Twitter is reportedly going with Goldman Sachs. Facebook decided to trade on the NASDAQ; Twitter is said to be leaning toward the New York Stock Exchange.
The most noticeable difference at this stage is how Twitter chose to file for IPO: The social network opted to file a confidential S-1 for its IPO rather than a public S-1 as Facebook was forced to do. By going this route, Twitter can delay some of the media frenzy that Facebook experienced after disclosing its numbers and later revising them. Twitter also can avoid posting sensitive business information for competitors to see until closer to the IPO — 21 days before, to be exact.
Confidential S1s? But what could be wrong with releasing 100s of pages of new financial and strategic co. info to the Internet while gagged?
— Andrew Mason (@andrewmason) September 13, 2013
Just as Twitter may be able to benefit from Facebook's missteps, it may also benefit from the resurgence of Facebook and other recent Internet IPOs. Facebook and LinkedIn both hit new all-time highs earlier this month, shortly before Twitter announced that it had filed to go public. That was probably deliberate.
"I think the week of the filing is more coincident with the rally than anything," said Michael Pachter, an analyst with Wedbush Securities. "To the extent that the early investors in Twitter are looking for an exit, this is about as good as it's going to get."
According to Pachter, Twitter's share price on the private market has traded "in concert with" Facebook's share price on the public market. Twitter, he says, traded around $20 range in the lead up to the Facebook IPO, then dipped back to $17 as Facebook's stock began to decline. Twitter's stock has since surged to the high-$20 range as Facebook's stock has rallied back above its IPO price.
"There's wind behind [Twitter] right now," Rao says. "The Facebook disaster and the negative sentiment around private companies lasted for almost a year. That's gone now after Facebook came back and proved their model."

FB data by YCharts
While Twitter stands to benefit from some of Facebook's mistakes, it may also be handicapped in at least one way that Facebook wasn't: Fewer investors have first-hand experience using it.
"I would bet you that 80% to 90% of institutional investors are Facebook users and maybe 20% use Twitter," Pachter said. That will make it all the more important for Twitter's management team to educate investors on its strategy during the road show prior to the IPO, and for investors to educate themselves on how Twitter works, where it generates revenue from and who it does and doesn't compete with. "I talk to investors who think they're savvy and say that Reddit is a threat to Twitter. They don't get it."
Lise Buyer, an analyst with Class V Group who helped Google go public in 2004, emphasized that the key takeaway from Facebook's IPO debacle is that investors need to focus more on learning the basics of a business rather than focusing on the headlines and the hype. Otherwise, investors may be in for an unpleasant surprise.
"The real lesson of the Facebook IPO is that investors should do their best to understand the fundamentals, size, growth and potential profitability before placing an order, rather than buying an IPO purely because a company is large, exciting or in the headlines," Buyer wrote in an email to Mashable shortly before Twitter revealed it had filed to go public.
"Some IPOs go up and some go down," she added. "There are no certain bets."
Image: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty