Twitter CEO Dick Costolo 2012 2
Twitter's CEO Dick Costolo is seen during a conference at the Cannes Lions in Cannes. Reuters

Twitter announced on Thursday that it plans to price its initial public offering in the range of $17 to $20 per share.

According to the New York Times, the social media company plans to sell 70 million shares of stock, which at their proposed price point would net roughly $1.3 billion. An IPO of that level would value Twitter at more than $12 billion, much larger than older Internet companies like AOL, but still far smaller than Facebook’s $127 billion market value.

"It's conservative and likely going to be raised as they start the road show at least once if not twice," Sam Hamadeh of PrivCo, a private company research firm, told Reuters of Twitter’s pricing.

"The size of the offering is also a bit small, but they may only choose to raise the price once they gauge investor demand. Raising both the price and the size was Facebook's fatal mistake."

Twitter, with roughly 230 million active users, is expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol TWTR as early as Nov. 7.