Twitter streams start to appear in directory listings and live searches

Posted: December 8th, 2009 | Author: Chris Norton | Filed under: Business | Tags: , , | 1 Comment »

There was some interesting news out yesterday about Citysearch, a local business directory service in the US that is now allowing it’s members to add their Twitter streams and Facebook pages into their directory listing profiles.

The post on City Searches’ blog states:citysearch site

Our new Claim Your Page product, allows all business owners to claim their Citysearch business profile and take control of their listing data.

This marks the first time in the local, online space merchants will be able to list social business data (Facebook Page URL too) side-by-side more traditional data like phone number and address. We firmly believe they are now equally important to consumers and businesses, and we are happy to see them appear this way on our site.

I have to agree with them, I think there has been a bit of an attitude shift in the way Twitter is viewed by business owners. People I now meet seem to be starting to take it more seriously now. For many it is still a bit of fun but I have definitely noticed a number of entrepreneurs looking at ways to use Twitter to raise the profiles of their businesses.

The blog continues:

As part of this launch, we’re excited to unveil Twitter’s new Sign-Up API. Any merchant without an existing Twitter username can now create one entirely and directly from Citysearch through Claim Your Page. Empowering small and medium businesses with social media is an important goal of ours heading into 2010, and we believe Twitter is one of the most important channels a business can utilize to connect with customers and better manage its reputation online.

It seems people are finally starting to believe that Twitter is an important business channel and I expect its importance to grow even further in 2010 albeit not as quickly as it has done this year. I also expect Linked-in to become a much more widely used product now that it’s API key has been opened up for other developers to play with. Get ready to see lots of clever little tools that help you liaise with your Linked-in connections. You can link up with me here.

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