Speculation about a Twitter acquisition has hit fever pitch with reports that the social media network may get a formal bid soon.
With Twitter's large audience - particularly among business users - it could be a pretty pickup for a tech company offering customer relationship management (CRM), which is why Salesforce is at the top of the list of possible acquirers.
Microsoft and Google's names are also being thrown into the hat, and both would make sense as well - particularly for Google whose own social network has been a dud to say the least. Microsoft, however, recently acquired LinkedIn and the product development for LinkedIn-Microsoft and then LinkedIn-Twitter-Microsoft sounds intense. Website Magazine has projected in the past though, that a company offering enterprise collaboration software - which Microsoft continues to invest heavily in - would be a good fit for Twitter if it did not make the pivot itself. Other companies Website Magazine has speculated would be a good fit for Twitter include Oracle, for the same reasons Twitter would be a good fit for Salesforce. What has to be top of mind, however, is the array of acquisitions already made by these companies this year (like Salesforce of Demandware and Oracle of NetSuite).
Google is a personal top choice to acquire Twitter as it already has a deal in place to use tweets within the search engine result pages (SERPs) and the information that the network provides - in terms of real-time coverage of events and news stories - is one that Google would be most capable of handling. Using Twitter in another capacity is certainly feasible but Twitter started the revolution of quick access to developing stories and Google seems most primed to capitalize on that from an information perspective (for the SERPs) as well as a sentiment analysis and predictive analytics standpoint (for search and social ads). If this happens, a company's 'Net identity and how it relates to its social-SEO will become even more important as the degree to which social signals matter for a company's visibility on the Web will increase.
There's nothing like a good potential acquisition story to get Web workers moving on a Friday, but it's likely a Twitter acquisition will move slower than the industry would like. That hasn't stopped Twitter shares from jumping among rumors of a takeover.