Can Twitter help my business?

By Wes Thompson / May 5, 2009

If you have found yourself asking the question, "can Twitter help my business?", you are not alone. There seem to be a lot of people trying Twitter out by popular demand, a handful of people that understand Twitter for what it actually is and a chosen few actually taking advantage of Twitter to benefit their businesses (not mentioning the spamers out there).

I am not going to pretend to have some elaborate or super strategic plan on how to take over your industry using Twitter. I am, however, going to show you one way that you can use Twitter to possibly benefit your business. It might help to tell you that I already know of a few businesses doing this and they are getting leads and getting business because of it.

Maybe Twitter Can Help Your Business

Here it is (this is for the beginners out there not for the seasoned Twitter folks):

1. Go to the Twitter Search page here: search.twitter.com
    
2. Click on "Advanced Search" link just under the search field
    
3. Here you can specify specific words that users are entering into their tweets. You can even specify tweets coming from tweeters within a certain mile radius of a chosen location (e.g. Birmingham, AL). For example, if you are a plumber looking for plumbing work in a certain area, you can search for words like "leaks, leaky, plunger or drain..."
    
4. Now that you have perfected your words and your location, you need to save the RSS feed so that you can keep up to date on this search. This will be located at the top right of the search results page and says "Feed for this query". Right-click, chose to save the link and paste the link into your RSS reader. From here on, every time someone tweets with the criteria you have specified, you will get them in the feed you have created.

If you are not familiar with the statistics, you will notice in the image below that Twitter is up there with Facebook and MySpace as far as Internet Audience Reach.

Here is a good article by WebProNews that will help you better understand Twitter