Jim Armitage: Twitter’s sluggish growth hardly warrants a $14bn bid

It’s hard to see why anyone would want to buy Twitter unless Jack Dorsey wants to sell it for a song.

If you believe the hype, the marketing giant Salesforce wants to gobble it up to gain access to real-time information on hundreds of millions of Tweeters’ movements.

Meanwhile, Google, having failed with its Google+ effort to get social, wants to use it to play catch up with Facebook.

Both those theories would make a compelling argument for a bid at Twitter’s current rumour-swollen value if this was a business that was growing its number of users exponentially. But it’s not.

In the super-Darwinian world of social media companies, Twitter, which in its first decade never got anywhere near as big as Facebook, has already been overtaken by four-year-old Snapchat.