Who will buy Twitter?

The struggling social media site is reportedly in talks with several suitors, including Google's parent company Alphabet and Salesforce.

First Look

Twitter is reportedly in talks with several companies that are interested in buying the social media site.

Among the suitors, reports CNBC, citing anonymous sources, are Google’s parent company Alphabet and Salesforce, which builds software that helps businesses manage information about their customers. Other companies rumored to be interested in buying Twitter include Verizon, AT&T, Chernin Group, and Microsoft, according to The New York Post. None of the companies involved have confirmed the rumors.

The prospect of a sale to technology analysts and observers seems likely, given that Twitter, which began trading publicly in 2013, has been struggling to grow users and revenue. Professional networking site LinkedIn was in a similar situation when Microsoft announced in June that it would buy the beleaguered company for $26.2 billion.

Twitter has added 9 million monthly users, 1 million of those in the United States, since co-founder Jack Dorsey was brought back in July 2015 as chief executive to save the nearly decade-old company, reports The Wall Street Journal. Facebook, in contrast, grew its monthly users in the same time-frame by 164 million.

Rumors of sales talks led to the largest one-day jump in Twitter’s stock value since its first day of trading in 2013. Shares jumped 20 percent to $22.46 per share on Friday. Before that, the stock had fallen 30 percent over the past year, as the Journal reports.

An acquisition by Google would make sense, since the search giant has been trying unsuccessfully to gain more share of the social media market.

“Twitter potentially would hold a lot of promise for a company like Google both to expand its advertising business on desktop and mobile, tapping into a stream of consumers of social media who are slowly being lured away from Google by another huge social media platform, Facebook,” writes technology news site TechCrunch.

Salesforce’s interest makes less sense on its face. But as TechCrunch suggests, perhaps one of the big attractions for the software maker is the real-time data from Twitter’s 313 million monthly active users. Salesforce is already known as a huge acquirer of companies, and, according to the Journal, has been interested in expanding into new areas of business. In fact, Salesforce tried to buy LinkedIn, but was outbid by Microsoft.