MapQuest recently added a Twitter feed to their local start pages that allows users to follow tweets from individuals living in their respective cities. All users have to do is select the city they’d like to follow, opt into the feed and voila! You can follow the tweets of people located in Austin, Portland, Boston, or any other city your inquisitive mind desires.  

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This development certainly adds to the already social aspect of the local start pages – you’ll notice the Local Reviews section of the page is “powered” by Yelp – and can provide small business owners with another opportunity to engage potential customers. Taken with the big picture in mind, the incorporation of Twitter into MapQuest Local follows the pattern of personalization across all Internet channels, from Google SearchWiki, the socialization of single sign-in protocols (Google Friend Connect, Facebook Connect) and personalized search results.  

Moving back to a more granular picture, the Twitter feed is not perfect.  The feed is not monitored or filtered, and as such, the feed picks up tweets originating from your city of choice regardless of the topic. Don’t be surprised to see an “F-bomb” appear in the feed — kids, cover your eyes! So, in terms of the feed providing small businesses with Tweeps (that’s Twitter for “peeps”) tweeting about your two-step lessons for twins, you’re out of luck. If you participate on Twitter as your business, you can potentially appear in the feed by posting consistently throughout the day – I posted a test tweet and it was picked up immediately by MapQuest’s Twitter feed.  

Additionally, the feed alerts you to active members of a burgeoning online community, and in this case an online community located in your city.  If you take only one thing away from this development, it should be to participate in these nodes of social media. Go where your customers socialize on the Internet, it’s all about the user!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 16th, 2008 at 11:59 am by Cory Barbot and is filed under Local Search, Natural Search (SEO), Social Media, twitter. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.