It's not just fun and games anymore. With about 12 million users, and a growing number of consumer and B2B brands on it, Twitter is fast becoming a place to 'do business'. Below I am listing a few tools that help perform key business functions on Twitter.
Trend Research. Check out TweetMeme. It shows you in real time the most popular links posted onto Twitter. Links are organized by categories, so this is a great place to keep an eye out on hot topics and trends in your business niche.
Networking & Lead Generation. To determine the most relevant people to follow on Twitter, use SocialWhois. You can get a list of people by typing in a keyword, like 'golf' or 'marketing'. You can also find out about a person's history and activity on Twitter. Also check out Twello. Designed and organized like the YellowPage, it is easy to find people in your business niche to connect to.
Productivity. GroupTweet allows you to create a group, and let group members tweet each other privately. Since only group members can see the group tweets, many small businesses are using this as a team communication tool. Nice concept, but personally, I think instant group messaging with chat history turned on achieves pretty much the same thing.
