Who Will Buy Twitter?

A few months ago many wrote the platform off as dead. Now it appears there may be new life based on reports that there is a three-way battle between Salesforce, Google and Microsoft to acquire the social network. Why would all three be interested in this platform? Here's a few thoughts I have on recent happenings. Of course, I would love yours since in the spirit of Twitter, two-way communication is important to building a better business.

1. Salesforce - Salesforce obviously sees value in three things Twitter has that other platforms do not: data rich info on users, the way the platform functions and how it continues to evolve (especially in areas of live video), and finally the advertising products. Personally I think the advertising products are great. They are real time, they deliver ROI and they are based on audience and objective. Salesforce could roll this into their CRM model in ways that really help companies (especially enterprise-level corporations), deploy real time marketing around context. I talk a lot about this in my book Disruptive Marketing which has been read by many at Salesforce (Tiffani Bova and Matthew Sweeney are two people who come to mind) as this contextual trends follows the next stage of evolution in social business marketing.
2. Google - Google already is helping Twitter with selling some of their ad products and probably sees Twitter as a dynamic real time search engine. If they acquired it, it would be to roll those social signals generated by Twitter into their search engine to give it greater context and real time richness. Also it could fuse how Twitter Ads functions into AdWords and create a whole new lethal search/social ad platform that I predicted back in 2011 on a Twitter chat with @TheSocialCMO in that all of these platforms work better integrated as hybrids than as separate entities.
3. Microsoft - (Disclaimer: Microsoft is my employer and I have no insider information. This is simply my opinion/speculative theory). Microsoft already made a play for the network I'm typing this on (LinkedIn) so to make the play for Twitter could help in three areas: 1. gaming as it becomes more social by design 2. Enterprise CRM similar to how Salesforce sees richness in the user data and how Twitter is used for customer service 3. synchronizing Twitter real time search into Bing. If Bing adds both LinkedIn data and Twitter data it could make Google have to play the catch up game in that it will be the only search engine with no social signals or social data integrated into its ad products.

Of course none of this could happen and Twitter could still make a go of it by going it alone. What are your thoughts? Who makes a good buyer and why?

Geoffrey Colon is author of the book Disruptive Marketing: What Growth Hackers, Data Punks, and Other Hybrid Thinkers Can Teach Us About Navigating the New Normal out now on Hardcover, Kindle and Audiobook.