Speculation that a major tech firm could take over Twitter returned in full force on Friday — only this time there might be more credibility behind the sale rumors.
The company’s stock soared by 22 percent at one point after CNBC reported that Twitter may soon get a formal acquisition offer from potential buyers that included Salesforce.com and Google’s parent company, Alphabet.
A top executive from Salesforce has tweeted explaining why it makes sense to buy Twitter. Salesforce, which earlier tried to acquire LinkedIn (which Microsoft eventually bought), is vying for a social networking platform in its kitty for long. The company, “which reached $6 billion in annual revenue faster than any other enterprise software company”, offers customer service software, market research tools, email marketing systems and other products and several of them already use social media.
“Why @twitter? 1 personal learning network, 2 the best realtime, context rich news, 3 democratize intelligence, 4 great place to promote others,” tweeted Vala Afshar, Salesforce’s “chief digital evangelist,” on Friday. Afshar, however, added that “he was tweeting a personal opinion and not confirming today’s rumors that Salesforce is interested in acquiring Twitter,” Wired reported. Google has experimented with social media in the past with Orkut and Google+ but failed. The company can use its popular Android smartphone operating system to promote Twitter’s mobile app, the report further added.
The shares of Twitter, which currently has 313 million monthly active users, jumped more than 20 per cent on Friday on the sales rumors which have been making the rounds for quite some time now. Twitter, which is struggling to add new users amid stalled growth, now has a market value of nearly $16 billion.
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