While Jonathan Ross helped me see the business value of Twitter, how could I be certain that Twitter was important to my business?

Starting from an email address, what you’d like to know is: Does my contact have a Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn account, or any other social media site?

Of the major sites, only Facebook lets you search for a user specifically by email address.

Find a Person on Facebook by Email

You can search for someone on Facebook at www.facebook.com/search/php?q=<email>. For example, to find Robert Scoble on Facebook you’d enter http://www.facebook.com/search.php?q= This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Find People on Twitter and LinkedIn

Neither LinkedIn nor Twitter allow you to search for someone by email address. They do allow you to import your contacts from various other services and automatically invite them to join, but that’s not necessarily what you want to do. And what about all the other services out there? Google+, Flickr, YouTube, FourSquare… the list goes on.

If only there was a way to easily discover where your existing clients and contacts hang out on social media…

Social Profile Discovery

When we created CubeSocial’s social profile discovery service we wanted to solve just this problem. CubeSocial lets you to upload a list of email addresses, and then simply sit back while it does the hard work of searching the internet for social profiles and creating a contact cards for all your contacts, just like this one:

What’s more, CubeSocial can locate social profiles on over 100 different services and then summarise where all your contacts are hanging out. This is the summary for our contacts:

When we decided to use social media to connect with our clients we wanted to make sure we were spending our time (and money) in the most effective way. Now we are letting everyone else do that too!