Twitter is a relatively open micro-blogging and marketing platform where opinions and shoutouts are expressed within its 140 character limit along with one image, gif, short video or link per post. Twitter has existed since 2006 and IPO-ed in 2013. Despite growing user-base and being one of the top three social media platforms, Twitter has failed to bring in surging stock prices. Twitter was an innovative idea though one can’t help but wonder if it was borne out of an averseness of talking too much. Despite other platforms like Instagram and Snapchat borrowing from Twitter’s microblogging concept, Twitter’s way of enabling a public multi-person discourse about current affairs is still quite unique today. Features such as retweets, likes enhance this unique aspect. Twitter’s main revenue stream is ads and Twitter has consistently invested in ad-tech acquisitions over the years (Niche, most recently). Twitter is about the Now. Hence, Twitter offers trending topics and the app-only Twitter moments feature (curated top posts in trending topics). To enhance this Now, Twitter acquired Periscope, a live video streaming platform in 2015 and acquired the rights to stream US NFL games in 2016.
For the last couple of years there has been persistent rumors that Twitter will be up for sale soon (the last time in 2015 just before Jack Dorsey took over as CEO). It’s quite a no-brainer really. In today’s tech scene, its hard to thrive on one product what with a large employee base and in-house infrastructure when your main source of revenue is online ads. Moreover, marketers can tweet to their followers for free further undercutting Twitter’s ad revenue. So one way to thrive is to make sure you have a parent company and when revenue is down, you make up for the deficit by trading cash with them for your data. Twitter’s data is valuable to any organization today who has a goal of developing AI-based technology. The offer amount on the table is important but is there someone out there who will act as a perfect complement for Twitter’s platform. Twitter was developed in Ruby on Rails, an open source gem with a gradual move to Scala over the years. Organizations that have in-house Scala expertise would be beneficial as that would allow for more lateral moves of talent to Twitter after acquisition. As a product, Twitter is an open social media platform which makes it difficult to put it to use for companies such as Salesforce which would probably like to apply it to CRM. Mostly that would involve taking the public platform of Twitter and converting it to something similar to Slack with invitation-based groups and channels. Google already has Google Plus, Disney doesn’t. Hence, Twitter might look good in the Disney portfolio. Not much else though. Stripping away parts of Twitter’s proprietary algorithms to apply to other products in-house can make some sense. Twitter’s new algorithmic feed can be useful to investment banking and financial tech firms. The most sense of a Twitter acquisition would be one from Facebook. Facebook is already a social media giant with their own native platforms and acquisitions such as WhatsApp. Twitter (product, platform and data) would bring their social media prowess full circle and no doubt as partners they would benefit each other technologically. Still in this scenario, Facebook will gain less than Twitter. After all, Facebook already has their own versions of most of the products Twitter has to offer (including their own algorithmic newsfeed). The unfortunate fact is that what is unique about Twitter might also make it unbuyable in its present incarnation. In an ideal world, an organization who is a giant in their own field (for instance, a hardware giant like Intel or IBM) looking to branch out into social media would be a good parent for Twitter. Someone who would let Twitter function the way it currently does. But the parent company needs to be faring well themselves. Dell, maybe.
The bane of Twitter’s existence is Twitter trolls. This is one of the reasons one of Microsoft’s first bots, Tay publicly imploded on Twitter. Whoever buys Twitter holds the responsibility of taking care of this problem that all social media platforms suffer from today sometimes leading to top influencers taking extended breaks from the platform.
