The group revealed its intentions in a tweet, which read: “We’ve confidentially submitted an S1 to the SEC for a planned IPO. This Tweet does not constitute an offer of any securities for sale.”

The San Francisco-based firm, which has more than 200m active monthly users, has managed to keep information about its IPO out of the public domain until now.

The seven year old company may come to market before the end of 2013, and could be valued as high as $15bn at its IPO, according to some estimates.

Earlier this year, Twitter was valued at $10bn in private transactions, which included an employee stock sale to fund manager BlackRock in January, the FT reports.

However, the company has never indicated it is profitable as it continues to invest in growing its business, and it may have to spell out to potential investors how it intends to generate growing revenues over the long term.

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Facebook and Linkedin both launched IPOs which had a rocky start after a great deal of hype, especially in the case of Facebook, but their share prices have since stabilised, hitting all-time highs this week.