Using Twitter as a marketing and business research tool

Twiter is a useful marketing research tool.

For marketing purposes, Twitter can quickly spread positive comments about a product while it can also generate negative buzz, too.

For business research using Twitter is a cost-effective and time-efficient way of gathering useful information and even networking for potential business contacts.

Simply entering a search term and seeing what people link to may be faster than using the traditional search engines. This article assumes you have a Twitter account. The users who are "tweeting" on that topic are users who are worth following for your company or consulting business.

Let’s say you want to conduct a search on favorite wines. Maybe you’re going to use them as promotional giveaways and you want to see which ones Twitter users recommend.

Here’s an example. Enter #smallbusiness and see what the results return. When I did that, I immediately found several people who seem worth following and their links to topics could prove useful for the online writing and research I do for myself and for clients.

Twitter is a strategic, free tool to begin using to find information – and people – with whom you might want to connect and eventually do business transactions together. Feel free to follow me. I'm @donsimko. Glad to make your Twitter acquaintance!

Click here to see how the online printing company PrintRunner is using Twitter strategically for its marketing and social media purposes.