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A screen grab of FourSquare's Louis Vuitton's pages gallery

On any given day, there are some 50 million connections between businesses and users on Facebook. The number one social network in the world realized over the past couple of years that individuals have no problem professing their love of a certain brands, and sharing that love with their online network. This proliferation of business pages has led other social companies to follow suit.

Foursquare, the location-based service, recently launched its own Pages Gallery. This is an area where users can check out who is following a brand and what comments they're leaving when they're checking in at relevant destinations. For example, on Louis Vuitton's page, there are hundreds of travel recommendations from the luxury brand's fans. This new section is topped off with a banner that says: "Where will life take you with Louis Vuitton on Foursquare?"



On celebrity Ellen Degeneres' page, it prompts users to check out what the talk show host is, well, checking out. If you follow Ellen you can then tap into her favourite places and you can also earn prizes and badges. Currently, this personal brand has more than 80 thousand followers. With a destination page like this, it should entice more people to pay attention to a company's Foursquare presence. According to Mashable, 1323 brands are currently using the particular check-in service.

With Facebook and Foursquare in the pages playground, it's natural that there is now buzz about similar functionality on Twitter. Although Twitter currently allows businesses to sponsor tweets on the site, a more comprehensive page could be useful for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, such a presence could help to generate long-term revenue for Twitter, something the company has been striving toward for some time.

While all of this is potentially great for businesses, what is the impact on users? Well, if Facebook is any indication, individuals are increasingly comfortable with corporations sneaking into their social networks. But the trick will be implementing strategies such as corporate pages in such a way as to not overwhelm or abuse users' trust.

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