Twitter’s new Facebook app launched this week with the purpose of allowing users to see which of their friends on Facebook are also on Twitter, and follow their tweets with a single click of their mouse.
However, the app isn’t working, leading many people to speculate as to whether Facebook has actually blocked the app. Users attempting to install the facility are today greeted by a message stating: “The Facebook app cannot currently access your Facebook friend list. We believe this is an issue on Facebook’s end.”
There is, of course, no way of knowing at this precise moment in time whether the failure of this integration is deliberate or is the result of a mistake, but the proposed facility in itself is big news for the social media world. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told Inside Facebook recently that he believes he originally paid Twitter too much attention (Facebook tried and failed to purchase Twitter in 2008 for $500 million), admitting he’d felt threatened at one point by Twitter’s growth.
Zuckerberg’s implication that he believes this threat is now over, citing the main difference in the two sites as Twitter’s purpose of not using your real identity, and Facebook being very much about expressing identity, makes it unlikely he would choose to block Twitter’s app in this way.
Internet Marketing
Putting speculation aside, whatever the reason for today’s fail may be, synchronisation of the social media giants in this way points to the growing importance of social media in internet marketing, and affirms the fact that any internet marketing strategy should encompass social media channels as standard.
LinkedIn last month increased its integration with Twitter, allowing users to follow their connections on the micro-blogging site, and we can expect further integration of social channels in the future.
Growth in social media use has changed the face of internet marketing as we once knew it. Brands/companies/publishers are no longer focusing on a one-track effort to be successful online, such as SEO, and are embracing a multi-faceted approach to internet marketing.
SEO
SEO is, of course, still vitally important and visibility on Google can be integral to success, especially for an ecommerce site. But SEO is no longer the be-all and end-all it once was, as if none of the traffic reaching a site converts to a sale, good SEO will have no effect on business success.
Coupled with this is social media’s popularity overtaking that of search engines, and the ever-increasing importance of user-generated content and peer recommendations in purchasing decisions that are pushing social media to the forefront of internet marketing.
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