Salesforce reportedly discussing Twitter acquisition

By Barry Eitel

SAN FRANCISCO (AA) – Shares of Twitter jumped more than 20 percent Friday amid multiple reports the company was approaching potential buyers, with the Wall Street Journal claiming cloud computing company Salesforce was considering a deal.

Along with the newspaper, sources revealed to several news outlets, including CNBC and TechCrunch, that Google, Microsoft and Verizon are also discussing a potential acquisition of Twitter.

Shares of the microblogging platform rose almost 22 percent Friday to $22.66 in mid-day trading. The stock closed Thursday at $18.63. Twitter’s stocks had fallen approximately 30 percent in the past year before Friday morning.

An early morning tweet from Vala Afshar, the “chief digital evangelist” of Salesforce, gave credence to the Wall Street Journal’s claims.

Afshar listed several reasons why a company would be interested in buying Twitter, noting that the service is a “great place to promote others” and offers “the best real time, context rich news.”

Now a decade old, Twitter has struggled to maintain even a fraction of the number of people who use social network Facebook, which was once considered the company’s major competition. Facebook now has some 1.71 billion monthly active users while Twitter has just 313 million.

Twitter also lags behind image sharing service Instagram, which has 500 million monthly active users, and messaging platform WhatsApp, which has more than 1 billion. Those companies are owned by Facebook.

Google and Microsoft have struggled to compete in the social media space. The Google+ network never found a strong audience since it launched in 2011 and Microsoft’s projects such as service So.cl, have fared even worse. The company announced in June it was acquiring business-focused social platform LinkedIn for $26.2 billion.

In the past two years Verizon has made some notable acquisitions of dusty Internet properties that were once digital leaders. Verizon bought AOL for $4.4 billion in 2015 and announced an acquisition of Yahoo this year for $4.83 billion.