Will Facebook dazzle Wall Street with Q2 results?

Come Thursday, Facebook will announce its first quarterly results since the launch of its much talked about IPO. The social networking giant which went public on 18 May, in an highly anticipated IPO that failed to live up to the hype, will be under immense pressure from Wall Street investors to post satisfactory results.

According to this New York Times report, Facebook’s first Q2 result since going public will be a test of how advertising has worked on the site. The report says that ,Google has been in the advertising game longer and has roughly $40 billion in annual revenue from advertising - 10 times that of Facebook. Since the public offering, Wall Street has tempered its expectations for Facebook’s advertising revenue, and shares closed Friday at $28.76, down from their initial price of $38.

[caption id=“attachment_389890” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  The social networking giant which went public on 18 May, in an highly anticipated IPO that failed to live up to the hype, will be under immense pressure from Wall Street investors . Getty Images[/caption]

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Facebook recently launched an ad exchange on the lines of what Google does in order to boost up advertising on its site. It had cut estimates at the time of the going public, as the site’s mobile usage was going up but it had no means of effective advertising on that particular platform. This coupled with General Motors withdrawing ads from Facebook had increased uncertainty over whether the social networking giant could be ever be a successful business model.

But it seems that there is a chance that the company could beat Wall Street when it posts its Q2 results on Thursday. According to Venture Beat,

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Facebook is likely to post a satisfactory earnings report, with second quarter revenue around $1.15 billion and earnings per share of $0.12, according to investment firm Wedbush.Wedbushmodeled Facebook’s Q2 revenue at $1.11 billion, but the firm actually expects the social network to meet or beat the industry consensus, per Thomson First Call, of $1.149 billion, which would show 28.5 percent year-over-year growth.

It also seems that at the same time Facebook is working hard to project an image of success. According to this report on CNET, the company’s outside PR firm, Brunswick Group, is sharing with journalists a list of selected Facebook news in case they weren’t watching when the items first came over the transom. In addition, they’ve compiled links to articles which stress that, yes, big advertisers (unlike General Motors) really do like Facebook as an advertising platform.

While PR may or may not work with Wall Street Investors, Facebook will have to face some tough questions regarding its money-making capabilities. But it seems for now, most analysts expect Facebook to beat the market’s highlypessimistic outlook regarding its success. A poll Thomson Reuters expects Facebook to report second-quarter revenue of $1.1 billion on earnings of 12 cents a share.

Facebook may not have touched $38 share price with which it opened but hopefully a successful Q2 result will see the company share priced rise about $28 at which it has been trading.