iTunes Store links up with Twitter via Ping

Ping, the social music service introduced as a part of iTunes 10 in September, can now be linked with Twitter, the popular microblogging service announced Thursday.

Starting today, Ping users can connect their iTunes Ping account to their Twitter account and share their listening activity in their Twitter feed. Tweets sent from Ping include the album and artist information, album cover, song preview, and a link to the iTunes store to buy the music mentioned.

This partnership is significant for both Twitter and Apple, because 95 million Tweets are sent every day, and many of them are simply to mention what music the user is listening to at the time, such as with the hashtag #nowplaying.

In the last two years, iTunes has been selling about 8.7 million songs per day, and pushing that activity together with the social sharing taking place on Twitter could result in a boon to sales.