Should Salesforce even acquire Twitter?
It turns out that Salesforce is the only company that is currently bidding for Twitter. Despite being an active Twitter user since 2008 and currently a Salesforce consultant, I am not sure this is a good move.
Abuse problem
Whichever company acquires Twitter also needs to figure out a long term solution to the abuse problem that exists on Twitter (it’s worse on Facebook). How much does Salesforce want to focus on that? Twitter might make sense for filling the gap in its B2C marketing portfolio and for customer support scenarios, but does it want to dedicate resources to handle this mess? It can meet both these needs by acquiring ad-tech companies and by working closely with Twitter on integration.
Alienate other networks
If Salesforce acquires Twitter, it will end up alienating other social networks. Facebook being the most important one and it already has an integration with Salesforce in the form of Facebook leads ads. LinkedIn is already a gone case.
Abysmal growth rate
Twitter’s growth rate has not been great for the past few years. Does it want to spend resources on figuring out how to make a B2C product work?
Product fit
Salesforce started off as a cloud based CRM company; the first of SaaS companies. It evolved into PaaS with force.com platform. It expanded portfolio to offer marketing, sales, support, work collaboration, BI and now AI solutions. All of these are business focused products. It is not clear how the company will integrate Twitter into Salesforce. Both the companies have very different work culture and it is not clear how they can be brought together or even if it should.
What do you think? Does this acquisition offer make sense?
