The new Twimbow app is a powerful web-based Twitter client much like Seesmic and Tweetdeck’s forthcoming application. In fact, it offers much of the same features and works almost exactly the same, so what does it have to offer that it would stand out from the pack? Simple: colours.

Although Twimbow works in much the same way as the aforementioned clients, and offers the same functionality including support for multiple accounts, the bright and shiny interface is far from a gimmick or a rainbow skin for Tweetdeck – the colours are vital to how it works and how it can help everyone from regular users of Twitter to advanced-level social media marketeers.

The interface allows users to assign different colours to specific members and groups and then gives the option to sort and filter your timeline by colour by applying the #colour tag. It works much like Gmail and Mozilla Thunderbird’s labels and folders functions and it’s easy to see how this functionality can be applied to social media marketing.

Internet Marketing

Future versions will apparently offer the ability to track and colour code keywords making Twimbow a potentially vital piece of equipment for internet marketing professionals and those of us who are adopting Twitter and other social media platforms as our predominant form of online communication instead of email.

Whether Twimbow’s colourful approach is successful, it’s difficult to imagine that a colour-coding or other tagging feature won’t be a part of the future of Twitter’s use for internet marketing. Although Twimbow is still in its pre-alpha stage with a stable public beta arriving in autumn, it has the potential to be a presence in the saturated Twitter client market.

Subversive advertising has been used to entice people to purchase a product or service without knowing they really wanted to for years. The truth of the matter is that we don’t like to feel we have been tricked into wanting something, we like to feel we have made our own choices and come to our own decisions and chosen something based on our personal preferences. Unfortunately, as any internet marketing professional will tell you this is not the case.

Social Networking

The general public like to follow what the rest of the public generally do, and therefore tend to buy products or use services that are recommended by likeminded individuals. This is where social networking sites such as Facebook could make money. After the fiasco over privacy, mentioned in an earlier post, it is evident that social networking sites need to monetise their members through advertising, without selling personal data.

Internet Marketing

An online marketing conference held in New York last week unveiled the current trend towards encouraging members of social networking sites to collect points by telling friends to buy into a particular brand. This actually has the potential to work on a number of levels. For a start, everyone likes to get things for free; so if the reward for boosting the profile of Pizza Hut is a free pizza, we are going to pass on whatever encouragement is needed to our peers to get them to purchase one too. The second factor is that people will only chase the things that they really want and like to get them for free. Ergo, if a particular service is sub standard according to the consumer, no-one is going to recommend it, because they will not want it again, and therefore whatever comes recommended by a ‘friend’ is more likely to be worth trying.

Subversive Advertising

This produces a type of trusted advertising which leads to the third factor. We want what our friends have, and if it is good enough for them, it is good enough for us. Although the whole process is completely transparent, when a picture arrives from Joe Bloggs eating a particular brand of pizza we will know it was sent because he wants to get another for free; it is a form of subversive advertising that could actually achieve success in the internet marketing arena.

This form of marketing can harness text, photo and video sharing on a number of platforms and there are currently a number of companies who are hoping to cash in on the advertising ploy. The result however could be that as consumers get rewarded for putting in the advertising leg work, marketing companies may well see a downturn in profits as their role in internet marketing becomes redundant.

It seems that Facebook can’t make a move these days without opening a fresh can of worms when it comes to online privacy issues. From the ‘panic button’ issue with the Conservative party to the latest fire they have come under regarding their new ‘like’ feature.

Users of the popular social networking site may have noticed that instead of becoming a ‘fan’ of something or someone, they now ‘Like’ them. On the face of things, this may seem like it is just a terminological change, but this is actually part of the wider rollout of Facebook’s new Open Graph API and “instant personalisation” features which uses your profile information on third party sites such as Pandora and Yelp.

New York Senator Charles Schumer wrote a letter to the FTC on Sunday pushing for the creation of privacy guidelines for Facebook and other social networks. According to Schumer, the heart of the issue is that Facebook roll out these features which can directly affect the privacy of the user and then place the responsibility on them to opt out of it rather than ask them whether or not this is something they want to be a part of.

Facebook, however, see it differently. They were quoted by an ABC local news affiliate as saying “none of these changes removed or reduced people’s control over their information”. Although that’s true, it’s also true that thanks to the new functions your information is now viewable in a lot more places than it once was and this slipped in without much of the user base knowing about it.

Interestingly, this subject doesn’t seem to have sparked much debate amongst the usually very vocal Facebook user base. Traditionally, Facebookers are very opposed to change, but this one seems to have snuck through the net, despite widespread political and media criticism. It’s unlikely that even if the traditional ‘1,000,000 to turn Facebook back’ groups did crop up the way they have in years past that Facebook would back down on these new features, but it will certainly be interesting to see whether the FTC get involved and if so, to what extent.

Following on from last week’s privacy bombshell, Facebook have sneakily rolled out a new feature which could potentially further impinge on user privacy – their version of Twitter’s popular ReTweet function, the Via feature.

The ReTweet or Via functions allow for a user to share another user’s post or link with their own friends list, giving the link or item a potentially bigger readership. On Twitter, this is simply done by typing RT @username before copy and pasting the post in, while Facebook’s new Via feature works by clicking ‘Share’ from an item posted in your news feed and a line saying “Via *Friend*with a link to their profile appears. Researching users as far afield as America, Europe and Australia has led us to believe that this new feature is live for all users. Give it a go yourself.

As it stands right now, the Via function only works for posted items such as videos or notes. You can’t currently share your friends’ statuses or updated pictures, but considering CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s assertations that ‘public is the new private’, we imagine that this new function isn’t far away as Facebook scrambles to stay atop the heap in the increasingly real-time-dominated web landscape.

As with everything Facebook-related at the moment, there are potential issues for users concerned about their privacy with this new feature, namely that if your privacy isn’t set to the right levels, a friend could share something you’ve posted and consequently spread a link to your wide-open profile to all their friends. If this isn’t something you want, be sure to put your profile’s privacy settings on full.

Moderating community sites such as internet forums is a largely thankless task; as a rule, users don’t like being told what they can or can’t talk about on the internet, and social networking sites such as Facebook are largely not much different. However, a site such as Facebook will naturally be much more difficult for moderators purely due to the size of it and the activity levels of its users. With over 350 million active members spending an average of 55 minutes a day on the site, that’s a lot of content to review.

Although Facebook has a moderation team in place which numbers into the hundreds, that’s still an almost impossible workload and clearly mistakes and controversial decisions will be made such as the recent decision to take down pictures of a breast cancer survivor’s mastectomy scars. Now, however, Facebook are doing what could be considered the unthinkable: letting its users police content.

Though Facebook has long allowed users to post complaints about groups or posts, the advent of the Facebook Community Council is a much larger step in the direction of user-moderated content. More of an app than an official ‘moderatorship’, its aim is to completely remove nudity, drugs, violence and spam which it does by Council members ‘tagging’ pieces of content which they find with one of eight phrases: Acceptable, Not English, Skip, Spam, Nudity, Drugs, Attacking, and Violence. If enough members tag the piece as unacceptable, action will be taken, usually in the form of taking it down.

Putting this kind of tedious task into the hands of the users is a good way of relieving the workload of what must be a very busy moderation team at Facebook, but it’s difficult not to imagine it being open to abuse as the Community Council opens its doors and allows everyone to become a member.

Although it seems that much of the current talk around microblogging phenomenon Twitter is about the development of an array of revenue streams, co-founder Biz Stone has denied that the company is for sale.

At an Oxford University event this weekend, Stone categorically denied that Twitter was looking to sell to the likes of Microsoft or Facebook, though he did hint at the potential of following in Google’s footsteps and taking the company public. He told reporters at the event that ‘We are definitely not interested in selling the company’.

Not that anyone who’s looking to sell a company ever says so outright in a situation like this, but with Twitter’s rapid growth and ever-expanding influence in the social media and business spheres, it might make sense for the creators to hold onto it for the time being. Having made successful deals with both Google and Microsoft’s Bing to index Tweets into search results, and with a range of other revenue streams including advertising and paid-for premium accounts in the works, Twitter could well be seeing some significant returns in the new year.

Continuing our series of pieces on link building through the social web platforms, today we’re going to take a look at social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Can they be used as a link building network, providing valuable inbound link juice, or is it a waste of valuable time and effort? The answer – as with almost everything in the search engine optimisation world – is that it’s a little of both.

Social Networking

A huge number of people have a social networking account, and a large amount of time is spent on them each day. According to Facebook’s statistics page, there are over 300 million active users on the site and a staggering six billion minutes are spent on it each day the world over. On average, a user has 160 ‘friends’ connected to their profile, meaning that in theory, these ‘friends’ could see your link, like it, repost it and thus build you a respectable number of high-quality inbound links.

There’s also the popular microblogging platform Twitter to take into account. Many companies, brands and celebrities are taking advantage of this site to interact with their fans or customers and are also using it to build brand awareness. Due to Twitter’s limiting of posts to 140 characters, many users post links to sites that interest them through URL shortening services such as Bit.ly and TinyURL, and again, there is the opportunity for friends – or ‘Followers’ – to share this link as well via ‘ReTweeting’. The advantage of Twitter for this purpose is that all posts are public, so your link could well turn up in searches, greatly increasing the chances of your link being seen and ReTweeted – you could potentially turn the entirety of Twitter into a link building network, creating millions of inbound links.

Indexing Issues

Unfortunately, this is all just theory. There are two major issues that prevent you turning Facebook, Twitter and most other social networking sites into your own personal link directory: indexing and the nofollow attribute.

In order to prevent spam, Facebook and Twitter apply the rel=’nofollow’ attribute to all outbound links, making them largely useless from a pure search engine optimisation standpoint as they won’t contribute to your site’s ranking. There is also the indexing issue to take into account: Facebook and especially Twitter pride themselves on their real-time nature; they want you to know what’s happening right now and with Facebook’s acquisition of real-time search engine FriendFeed, this trend looks set to continue. It’s precisely because of this instantly updating nature that even if the links were ‘dofollow’, chances are they would be gone from the front page before the search engines got around to indexing them, meaning that they might not be that useful.

Traffic Generation

However, when it comes to driving traffic to your site; social networking is a method that’s proven to be very effective. Provided you are offering content that people are interested in and presenting it in an engaging manner, chances are, people will be interested by it enough to click your link and see what your site has to offer.

If it’s interesting enough, they might even repost, ReTweet, Digg, Sphinn, or blog about it, meaning that although you won’t get many usable inbound links out of the process, chances are, there will be plenty of threads laying across the internet which will lead visitors back to your site.

The latest social networking success, Twitter is officially the fastest growing website in the UK according to Hitwise.

The internet analyst company have released their 2009 growth statistics which show the rapid growth of the micro blogging site. Currently the fifth most popular social network, Twitter has benefitted from celebrity exposure, with the likes of Stephen Fry, Lily Allen and Jimmy Carr posting, or ‘tweeting’, regularly allowing fans to keep in touch.

Twitter was ranked 84th most popular site in 2008 and has seen a huge growth in traffic in the last year, jumping 79 places up the chart – Twitter is fast becoming as cool as the iPod, Blackberry, Xbox and indeed Facebook.

The US based website is also becoming a valuable marketing tool, with many large organisations and multinational companies joining the Twitter phenomenon. UK companies have been slower out of the blocks than their US counterparts have in utilising this new medium: Dell, for example, use Twitter to communicate directly with customers – that certainly beats getting jammed in a call centre queue.

Live tweets and hashtags are features unique to Twitter, and with its relatively new Twitter Search function allowing real-time search capabilities, paid advertising is surely imminent.

Part of Twitter’s success story in the UK over the past 12 months has been down to its user-friendliness, addictiveness and the fact that it is not in direct competition with Social Network giants Facebook, MySpace and Bebo. It is a certainty that a unique application such as Twitter will continue to grow, but whether a suitable business model can be found to match it remains to be seen.