Social media is huge and it’s here to stay. As of January 2014, 74% of online adults use social networking sites. That’s an enormous number that’s only going to continue to grow year over year.
It’s easy to see why social media has caught on. You can do anything, keep up with your friends from around the world, stay up to date with your favourite brands and companies, and best of all, you can spend a significant portion of your day insulting random strangers that you never met before.
Facebook is all set in the social media realm, it’s by far the biggest social media platform, with 71% of all online adults using the platform as of September 2014. As if that wasn’t good enough, Facebook went shopping and bought itself the very popular Instagram and the massively successful WhatsApp.
What about Google though? The search engine giant has a mind blowing market cap of over 367 billion dollars, whereas Facebook makes do with a measly 229 billion dollar market cap. How is Facebook all over the map with an arsenal of super successful products whereas Google makes do with its lousy Google Plus?
Seriously, do you know anyone that uses Google Plus? We wouldn’t be surprised if a significant amount of Google Plus activity is simply users helplessly clicking about trying to get back to their gmail account.
This is where Twitter comes in. Twitter is the second most popular social media platform following Facebook. So would it make sense for Google to buy Twitter and finally get serious about social media? Recently there have been multiple rumors about Google possibly making an offer to buy Twitter. This, among other factors has seen the Twitter stock go up by over 10% in the last month!
What does Google stand to gain by buying Twitter?
Well firstly, Google would gain access to even more sweet users and their data. Twitter currently has close to 300 million users. This could help make Google ads even more effective or alternatively Google ads could be implemented in the Twitter platform.
Secondly, Google would finally get itself a proper social media platform. Despite having as near as make no difference, unlimited resources, Google has thus far failed at making a social media platform in-house. Buying Twitter solves this embarrassing problem.
What’s in it for Twitter?
For Twitter this may be the ideal time to be bought out. Growth is slowing down and beginning to level off at about 310,000,000 unique visitors a month. Since Twitter’s IPO, many investors and analysts sounded concerns about a bubble and a large number of users that simply aren’t very active on the platform. Should Google takeover, Twitter would stand to gain from Google’s vast expertise in monetization and hopefully make more money from the platform. Also, there is the possibility of implementing Twitter features into the Google search engine. Perhaps relevant Twitter profiles could come up when you use Google Search. That would be awesome!
Bonus infographic!
We all love infographics, so once again Bizzvenue brings you an awesome infographic comparing the key data from the two social media giants. Enjoy!
