Twitter (TWTR) investors are seeing a nice boost in share price today on rumors of a sale. Of the two companies looking to buy the troubled social media platform,Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google and Salesforce (CRM) , Alphabet appears to be the one most likely to be able leverage Twitter's data and user base to drive revenue...

Google is one of the richest corporations in the world, and how it has amassed that fortune is primarily by selling ads that are related to people's search queries. This is an extremely effective way to reach customers, because when you know exactly what somebody is searching for, you can deliver ads directly related to those queries. For some circumstances, it really is the only way to go.

But in other circumstances there is a different way to target customers and that's using ads based on demographics, in Google's case that's called display ads. With demographics essentially you can reach users who you know have an interest in what you have to offer. When it comes to this type of advertising, Facebook (FB)  is king. Facebook knows your age, sex, behaviors, what you like, it knows what you like to talk about and even what you've said. On top of all that, Facebook buys information about its users from third parties to know even more about them.