In the last year, Twitter’s gone from being a hot start-up to a household name.  An amazing story that seems to continue.  Twitter’s traffic is up 5x (estimate according to Quantcast) since the beginning of the year, and while its ability to generate big-time revenue is still a work in progress, for the time being it doesn’t really matter.  

In any case, with millions of individuals signed-up and spending time on the service, it’s only natural that businesses have followed.  Some are being more creative with the service than others, Best Buy for example creating twelpforce, a twitter account set-up to answer customer product questions using the collective knowledge-base of Best Buy employees.  However, despite lots of attention and a nationwide TV ad campaign, twelpforce hasn’t exactly developed a celebrity like fan base with just 9,000 followers.  As other companies (big and small) try to figure out how (or if) Twitter can benefit their businesses, it looks like private equity is now stepping into the Twitter world as well.  

UK based mid-market firm Endless LLP created an account in May (amongst more firms I’m sure).  Endless hasn’t exactly demonstrated that it’s addicted to the service.  Thus far, Endless’ few Tweets have been sporadic, covering recent deals, personnel moves, and portfolio company news.  After raising its second fund in 2008, Endless is certainly on the prowl for deals, and its Twitter experiment must reflect this.  However, while it’s doubtful Twitter will ever work wonders like the occasional cold-call, the service is one of those things where it doesn’t cost anything, takes little time, and ultimately can’t hurt.  I think it’s doubtful we’ll see lots of investment firms jump on the bandwagon as well, but if we start seeing lots of Tweets out of a few that do, perhaps there’s something there.

CVC Partners can thank weak credit markets for being the last firm standing with enough interest to bid on Anheuser-Busch InBev’s Central and Eastern European businesses.  TPG and KKR had also planned bids but are “blaming” weak credit conditions for bowing out of the process.  Given KKR’s very recent successful close of InBev’s Korean assets, you’d think they’d have the process down.  In that deal, KKR put down 50% (later split with Affinity Equity Partners), which is also what CVC is rumored to be plunking down for InBev’s latest divestiture.  Either way, given the similarty, perhaps we’ll see a familiar name emerge alongside CVC if a sale actually comes through.