Twitter is like chat – but, it’s much more. When you sign up and get a user name you can start adding people you “follow” to your account. Others can also add you to their list of followers.

When you “tweet” something – or send a text message it will be (can be) seen by your followers. They’ll have to look for it, but they can find it if they’re looking. Likewise if you want to you can see the tweets the people you’re following sent out by going to twitter.com and looking for them in the center column.

What does this have to do with business?

Go to Twitter Search (http://search.twitter.com). Type in a keyword for a product or whatever business niche you’re involved in. Say I have a travel agency that specializes in Hawaii travel, I might type in:

“going to hawaii”

When I did this I got 9 results out of 15 for people that tweeted they were going to hawaii. In less than 1 minute I found 9 potential customers for my business.

Using advanced search you can tweak your query to be more specific.

How you handle the next step is up to you. You could try the direct approach and send them a reply by putting the at “@” sign infront of their username followed by a space and your tweet message to them. “Mentions”  are easier to see than general tweets and there is a link to see mentions on the right side of the twitter.com home page when you’re logged in that looks like @username.

I might direct message those 9 Twitter users with a message like,

“Hawaii is the best! Which island will you go to? If I can help you with finding best price for anything just let me know… – John”

You only have 140 characters to work with, which is one of the idiosyncracies of Twitter.

Learn to use Twitter at a high level and find leads daily for whatever business you’re focused on. Twitter has about 7 million people today, that is growing very quickly as more people find out what it can do for them.

Try it!