Twitter Synergies Matrix

The perception of Twitter’s existential threat has been, what is Twitter? I’ve divided Twitter’s potential areas of interest for a suitor as follows:



* Real Time Data: Breaking news and live events happen on Twitter. It’s a treasure trove of data that is licensed by who is who of financial, healthcare and technology sectors. Twitter moves markets and predicts outbreaks before they make the news.

* Customer Relationship Management (CRM): You might find this as an odd functionality of Twitter. But make no mistake, Twitter’s most untapped potential lies in serving customer service. This is the most powerful medium for customer service, it has no equal — phone, email, chat, website, in-store. When you serve your customers, real time, well, on an open forum, people take notice, adds goodwill to the company. Twitter has recognized this potential and has recently made moves specifically in this area for customer service teams to serve their clients better. No wonder Salesforce is on the list of suitors.

* Social: Best known feature of Twitter — brevity. Twitter is the town hall of the world. You discuss breaking news and live events on this platform as they happen. Most influential social network, most powerful people and corporations on earth have verified twitter accounts. It also acts as public announcement forum — government agencies, police departments, weather service — all have verified official accounts.

* Video: Vine is GIFs with audio and analytics. Periscope for live streaming to the world, even from a GoPro mounted on a drone. Now with wide-ranging licensed live streaming content including sports and politics within Twitter.

* Ads: Promoted Tweets and analytics. Amplify for video ads.

* Broadcasting Platform: Celebrities dream — You own the broadcast, direct to audience. Unfiltered. Unbiased. Official news organizations and reporters provide trusted news reports and insights. Government agencies and corporations provide announcements, real time, instead of updating a website or sending an email.

* Research dataset: The content and data generated by the network is valuable for research — Natural Language Processing and possibly other research fields — finance (sentiment analysis) and healthcare (outbreaks).

* Internet of Things (IoT): Twitter is the public API for the web. What if you can have traffic sensors broadcast real time traffic updates on Twitter? NFL players’ sensors broadcasting health status real time on Twitter? If you have a IoT sensor that produces publicly shareable data, Twitter is your real time broadcast network. Connected cities can have Twitter as the medium to broadcast real time data instead of sharing it on the website.



On its own twitter is worth, less, but with a Microsoft acquisition it’s most valuable.



Bing can provide exclusive Twitter insights and trends. MSN currently syndicates it’s news from around the web from top news publications, this could further create value up and down the food chain. Microsoft dynamics CRM could provide exclusive access to this customer service medium or provide advanced features and keep out competitors like Salesforce. Checkmate. Twitter would also provide a consumer social network that Microsoft never had. An influential social network that can complement LinkedIn. Twitter Ads could integrate with Bing Ads and provide additional ad inventory and scale. Periscope and Vine could boost content and reach to compete with YouTube and Facebook. Periscope and Vine could also provide exclusive content for Windows and Xbox. Tay comes alive for NLP research. Customer interactions can be analyzed to provide corporations who use Dynamics with better insights. Windows IoT sensors could be integrated with Twitter API and large scale processing offloaded to Azure. Scale Bot Framework to more users by leveraging Bots in a broadcast mode network with possible integrations with IoT sensors.



Most of the synergies that Twitter provides complements Microsoft’s offerings the best, because Microsoft has no superior competing products or features. But when Twitter’s offering are compared to Google or Facebook, they appear inferior. Facebook Live and Video has more scale than Twitter’s offerings. Same with YouTube and Google Ads.



Microsoft is the only company that can take most advantage of Twitter’s potential use cases when compared to the other suitors.