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How Twitter Could Dominate Local Search

Twitter could emerge as a major player in local search, argues Steve Espinosa of Local Search News. The simple question "What are you doing?" is inherently local, whether local to you or to someone else, he says. The obvious example is tweeting about going out to dinner. There are tons of results of people talking about local restaurants on Twitter; Espinosa thinks the microblogging service should create business pages for restaurants and other local establishments, so people can see what Twitter users are saying about that restaurant or local business in real time.

These Twitter business pages, if they were structured into a SEO-friendly directory, could grow Twitter's traffic enormously, Espinosa argues, especially if they started showing up in search engine results pages. And they could largely be static pages, providing basic contact information about the restaurant or business along with a list of tweets. Twitter, of course, would charge for these accounts. It could also charge for sponsored placement of these pages in Twitter search results or alongside other company pages as a kind of "You Might Also Like" feature.

Meanwhile, to execute this on a broad scale, Espinosa says Twitter could simply partner with the likes of Superpages, City Search and others that already have customers, credit card info and revenue, eliminating the need to hire its own sales force.

Read the whole story at Local Search News »

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