After years of buyout rumors, Twitter Inc. has been approached by several potential buyers and may receive a formal acquisition bid before long, according to a CNBC report.

Anonymous insiders who leaked the news to the channel said Software as a Service (SaaS) giant Salesforce.com Inc. and Google Inc. parent Alphabet Inc. are among the suitors involved in the talks. The price tag could be as high as $30 billion, according to Recode.

Twitter is also looking at a “revamping” of the company that could include asset divestitures and layoffs, according to The New York Times, which said it’s working with two investment banks, Goldman Sachs and Allen & Co.

Twitter has been struggling with flagging user growth and a strategy that has confused investors, despite the return of cofounder Jack Dorsey (above) as chief executive almost a year ago. But its status as a prime place for people to surface and comment on news and events has a lot of potential value to acquirers.

“It has much to offer its suitors, whether they be internet giants or SaaS players,” Forrester Research analyst Erna Alfred Liousas said in an email. “Data, its brand, technology, partnerships and users are among the benefits it provides.” Global Equities Research analyst Trip Chowdhry told SiliconANGLE that he believes the key value of Twitter to Google and others is the sentiment data that can be mined from billions of tweets.

That explains the search giant’s interest in Twitter. What’s more, Twitter could boost its persistent attempts to take on the social networking world with Google Plus and the effort’s mostly lackluster results so far. Buying an established player could finally make Google a social networking player while cementing its hold in digital advertising.

“Content can create community in Twitter in a unique way,” said Peter Burris, chief research officer at Wikibon, owned by the same company as SiliconANGLE.  That could be valuable to Google and other companies, he said on a podcast today from theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s video unit.

The reasons behind Salesforce.com’s reported involvement in the acquisition negotiations are much less straightforward. One of the main factors to consider is that the cloud giant reportedly placed an unsuccessful bid for LinkedIn Corp. before it accepted rival Microsoft Corp.’s winning $26.2 billion offer in June.

Acquiring Twitter could give Salesforce access to a treasure trove of consumer and brand activity data that could be tremendously useful for its enterprise users. Some salespeople, for instance, already use third-party tools to seek out tweets that indicate deal-making opportunities, while many support teams are doing the same to identify unsatisfied customers.

Vala Afshar, Salesforce.com’s chief evangelist, also mentioned a few of Twitter’s other advantages via a pair of tweets sent right after word of the acquisition rumors broke.

Why @twitter?

1 personal learning network
2 the best realtime, context rich news
3 democratize intelligence
4 great place to promote others

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) September 23, 2016

I have tweeted my personal views regarding ‘Why Twitter?’ numerous times over the past couple of years. I simply love Twitter.

— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) September 23, 2016

And shortly after Afshar’s comments, The Wall Street Journal published a separate report that reaffirmed Salesforce.com’s interest in buying Twitter and attributed the information to the usual “people familiar with the manner.”

Still, some believe Salesforce could be the wrong acquirer. “People think it’s a social network when it’s really a communications backbone,” SiliconANGLE Media co-Chief Executive John Furrier said in theCUBE podcast. “Salesforce is all about selling. People on Twitter don’t want to be sold to, they want to communicate. … Google would be a better fit.”

TechCrunch, meanwhile, claims to have been told that Microsoft Corp. and Verizon Communications Inc. are also involved in the talks. It seems unlikely that Redmond is seriously considering an acquisition given that it has not even finalized the purchase of LinkedIn, but the software giant still has deep pockets. So does Verizon, but it is in turn in the process of absorbing Yahoo Inc.’s web assets.

Whether it’s acquired or goes it alone, analysts believe Twitter, which has introduced new features such as NFL game livestreams and a Moments news curation tool, needs to zero in on its essential appeal. “Focus is key for Twitter’s survival,” said Forrester’s Liousas.

Investors aren’t waiting for anything official. They have already starting buying up Twitter shares in a rush that sent its stock price soaring by 22 percent near the close of trading today.

With reporting from Robert Hof

Image via Flickr