How will Salesforce benefit if it manages to bag Twitter?

Rumors and anticipations about Twitter’s acquisition have been flooding the internet space for the last 24 hours. With deep-pocketed rivals like Google, Microsoft, Disney and Verizon allegedly participating in the bid, Salesforce’s interest in the social platform has left industry experts bewildered. While Twitter officials claim that any deal is unlikely to happen soon, here’s how we think the CRM giant will be impacted if it wins the Twitter deal.

Why it’s a thumbs up?

Salesforce customers largely interact with service professionals through social media, and Twitter’s acquisition would facilitate their interaction with customers as well. Its AI platform Einstein utilizes tweets to highlight how brands are viewed by the general public. Salesforce can integrate its transactional data with customer information available on Twitter. A social media platform as widely popular as Twitter would serve as a great place to promote clients. The acquisition will help Salesforce come at par with competitors like Oracle that has bought AddThis for audience tracking, BlueKai for advertising data and Datalogix for marketing data over the last few years. Salesforce can use Twitter’s large-scale marketing and customer service to augment its Community Cloud offering. Twitter data can be leveraged across the Salesforce platform for innovation, development and analytics. Twitter’s strategy of displaying content video-first with new applications on streaming services such as Apple TV, can help the CRM company attract new users. The social media platform’s Moments feature introduced last year, which curates tweets of the day’s most talked-about stories has looped in many newcomers. Salesforce can use this feature to reach out to new prospects and customers. Salesforce has indicated an interest in branching into new areas and this deal will give the company an identity makeover from a technology stalwart to a media company.

Why it’s a thumbs down?

Twitter CEO and Co-Founder Jack Dorsey is also handling another CEO job at Square Inc., the mobile payment company, and may not come along with an acquisition. Salesforce has to counterbalance the lack of Twitter’s growth — the reason behind considering to sell the company; Twitter has just 9 million monthly users. Management turmoil might affect workforce productivity as there are rumors of internal disagreements between Twitter Co-Founders, Evan Williams and Jack Dorsey. Twitter’s stock is trading lower than usual and is down by more than 4 percent this year to date.

Monitoring social media content in accordance with censorship and cyber laws is a new and tough ballgame for Salesforce to handle. Twitter’s ownership by a single private company might cause Salesforce’s competitors to refrain from using the platform or may backfire by favoring a competitor such as Facebook, potentially leading to fewer users of the platform. Given the primary forte of Salesforce that revolves around providing CRM software services to businesses, Twitter appears to be an odd fit for the company. But considering the possible advantages of this acquisition, the ups cannot be disregarded. After having lost the bid to buy social-networking company LinkedIn to Microsoft, this acquisition may act as a stepping stone in consumer media.