• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, December 7, 2009

Citysearch plans to reveal Monday a deal with Twitter that lets businesses integrate Twitter streams on their business profile page. The agreement lets companies combine social media through Twitter's Sign-Up API.

Businesses can integrate their existing Twitter name or create a new account directly from the Citysearch business profile through the Claim Your Page feature. The tool, which also provides suggestions for Twitter names, invites consumers to tweet and interact with businesses on the site.

The Twitter stream appears near to the company's Citysearch listing. Michael Francesconi, director of community at Citysearch, says the tool sandwiches tweets from Twitter between editorials and consumer reviews. Three tweets appear on the page. But people who come to the Citysearch site can click on a link to see up to 100 stored company-related tweets. The tweets have a one-minute delay.

Francesconi says Citysearch reached out about two-and-a-half months ago, just after Twitter received the $100 million in venture capital backing earlier this year. "This is the first step in the evolution of the product," he says. "Just like reviews, we are considering other features, similar to reviews."

It's a part of a push to offer free services on Citysearch, Francesconi says. The next step to look at sentiment and pull in common words related to tweets should appear in about two weeks. It will let consumers find the information they care about most and give each a specific rating, without having to weed through hundreds of tweets.

Down the road, Citysearch also plans to highlight the frequency of words and specific events being written about in the tweets. There are no plans to integrate advertising based on the tweet streams, although there have been industry discussions by companies wishing to tap into third-party sites to serve up ads. And Citysearch has been looking at how to pull in references based on mentions of the business tied to geographical location data.

Search engines Bing and Google have integrated Twitter streams. Francesconi believes that continually bringing in fresh content into the site will help companies rank higher in search engine results.

And while companies like the National Hockey League recently began streaming NHL-related Twitter streams on their site, companies have yet to integrate social media into business listings. Combining the two, social media and business listings, surfaced as a recurring theme at last week's MediaPost Search Insider Summit in Park City, Utah.

The move to elevate social media into Citysearch business listings will lead sites to pull in more real-time data from a variety of sites. "We were early with Facebook Connect, too," Francesconi says. "This enhances the mobile experience, and we're looking at how to bring in Facebook status. If other sites aren't doing it yet, I would make the bet that it's coming within the next quarter or two."