The future of Twitter is everyone’s favourite discussion topic at the moment. Jack Dorsey’s brutal summary of the problems facing the company has encouraged speculation around who might want to buy the company.
Mathew Ingram’s covered exactly why Google should want to buy Twitter, but should Twitter look to sell?
In a word yes — for 3 main reasons:
1) Ad know how
Twitter has struggled to monetise its offering. Google is better than anyone else at making digital advertising pay.
Whether it’s topic based or linked to content — Twitter needs the expertise and reach that Google’s existing network brings.
Advertisers would love this too — a single point of contact to cover search, YouTube pre-roll and Twitter would make running integrated campaigns a doddle.
2) Security
Google’s commitment to Google+ showed they’re willing to invest time and money in making a social platform work. Twitter has shown it can create an engaged audience — it’s challenge right now is growing what it already has, rather than attempting to create a Facebook competitor from scratch. Google will provide the time and security Twitter needs to experiment and figure out how exactly it can crack the mainstream.
3) Access to talent
Twitter has a problem retaining staff. That’s the media narrative anyway. It’s not entirely true, but it’s becoming seen to be a problem. Google on the other hand has no problem attracting talent. If Google own Twitter, Twitter get access to all Google’s existing talent at a single stroke. But best of all, they become a very attractive proposition in their own right — go to Twitter , make it into a genuine Facebook rival and then explore your options with Google. What’s not to like#?
What about investors?
And why should the shareholders sell? Simple — Google will pay a good price and they’ll be free of an investment which looks set to get worse before it gets better.
As Ingram points out — there may never be a better time to buy Twitter. But, there’s also never been a better time for Twitter to sell itself.
