What if MSN bought Twitter?

There has been a lot of speculation on the value of Twitter and quite rightly. I won’t explore it all but the most recent one says maybe a billion but I think this kind of assessment of the value of social media has to be done differently if it’s going to be done seriously.

To begin I don’t think VC’s are going to be fooled by the old reach / buzz being the primary valuation mechanic. Dot.com bubble then a second time by MySpace and Facebook. It just aint worth $1 billion and in these economic times it sure as hell is not. On its own Twitter has a long way to go to being a profitable biz it’s all speculative. Facebook has only just started to break even and poor old Rupert is totally bumbling along with his very expensive gift to Jnr which could become a mountain of debt.

So its value all comes down to who buys it. What value it brings the buyers existing biz and vice-versa.

So when would it be worth $1 billion. Well. What if MSN bought it? What if they integrated it into Messenger, syncing it with MSN Groups and Hotmail? The whole suite. If MSN’s reported figures are anything to go by it has the largest global reach of any social media through Hotmail alone. Yes email is social media for those in doubt. So add that with MSN Groups, Messenger with a desktop app on X million computers (anyone know the figure?) AND Bing. You just need to crack mobile which Twitter kind of already has.

It has good proven ad technology and a well organized global sales force behind it for agency / big client advertising. It would only need to adopt a Google Adwords approach to hit the long-tail and bingo you have the number one cash rich social media platform tied together by Windows Live ID that syncs the lot.

It looks like MSN are already trying to make Messenger more like Twitter with ‘Whats New’ and ‘Post Note’. Don’t bother just buy em. You have the pockets.