Facebook raised the price for its initial public offering (IPO) on Tuesday, underlining the strong demand among investors who want to own a piece of the world's most famous social network company.

In a regulatory filing, Facebook said it will sell its stocks on public market at a price of 34 U.S. dollars to 38 dollars, up from its previous range from 28 dollars to 35 dollars.

At the upper limit of 38 dollars per share, the company will raise about 12.8 billion dollars, about eight times as much as the 1.67 billion dollars raised in Google's 2004 IPO.

The highly-anticipated IPO is expected to complete late Thursday. If everything goes smoothly, the stocks of Facebook are going to be traded on the Nasdaq stock exchange on Friday under the symbol "FB."

At the current price, the market value of Facebook would amount to more than 100 billion dollars, witch is regarded as overvalued by lots of analysts.