By now, I’m sure you’ve seen the headlines from yesterday’s Facebook f8 conference in San Francisco, which talked about the social network’s new plan to introduce a comprehensive set of social features that can be easily integrated into websites.
Starting this week, developers can begin including the Facebook “Like” button on any content on their sites, whether it be a photo, article, video – or for our purposes, a local business. Users will also be able to view which of their Facebook friends have visited a certain site and what content they liked.
In a sign of the Yellow Pages industry’s quick adoption of new trends in social media, Canada’s Yellow Pages Group announced that is already integrating Facebook’s new social plugins on its flagship YellowPages.ca website.
The press release notes that with a single click of the Facebook “Like” button, YellowPages.ca users can now highlight a positive experience with a local business or service directly on the site, as well as see which businesses their friends on Facebook “Like” and have their “Like” appear in their Facebook newsfeed.
The move comes one month after YPG introduced new ratings and reviews, restaurant profiles, and online coupons on YellowPages.ca and just days after AT&T Interactive announced that it is opening its new local social search site, buzz.com, to the public for testing.
Additionally, in a separate release, YPG announced that it had launched a new Urbanizer iPhone application that offers mood-based restaurant recommendations. The new app is linked with Facebook Connect so that users can share their business experiences with friends, tag establishments they’ve visited, and identify their favorites.
With so much conversation during our annual conference this week about the growing importance of social media and mobile opportunities, I’m glad to hear that our member companies are on the front lines of these new technologies. This is a really exciting time for our industry.
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[...] are several exciting social media integrations launching within the local search space. Yellow Pages Group recently incorporated Facebook’s new Social Plugins program into its flagship YellowPages.ca website, allowing consumers who “like” a business to highlight [...]