I have been using Twitter for a couple of years at least. I have a personal account and a professional one (@gareth_case). I often get asked what its real purpose is. Well for me it does two things. My personal account is following everything and anything I am interested in, mainly Football and comedy. My professional account is used to promote my blog and listen to the world of marketing from some of the industry leaders and up and coming talent.
BUT HOW SHOULD BUSINESSES USE IT TO DRIVE REVENUE?
Social channels such as LinkedIn make it easy to quickly see the benefit from a business perspective. Ultimately, what you have got with LinkedIn is the world's most up to date contact database. Don't believe me? Try searching for people you know, you will see their employment history and more often than not, it's up to date. It's fresh because we use LinkedIn to stay in touch and promote ourselves, why wouldn't you want it to accurately reflect who and what you are doing today.
Twitter poses a different problem, I wouldn't recommend searching for people on Twitter to sell to, but it is a tremendous community of people sharing and asking for advice on all manner of things. As a little experiment, open Twitter and use the following search term - "anyone recommend" in the speech marks. When the results come back, change 'Top' to 'All'. You're searching one of the worlds largest social channels for anyone asking if any of their followers can recommend something to them.
I know this is very generic so let's try again with a more specific search term.Now search for "anyone recommend a restaurant" - You can also use advanced search to drill results down to a geographical location. Don't stop at "anyone recommend" try some search terms of your own and you'll be amazed at the number of opportunities that are there, right in front of us on Twitter everyday. Once you have found some search terms that suit you, run them in the morning and leave the twitter feed running in the background, that way you can just check in to the page periodically to see any incoming requests. Good luck...
If you have any success please let me know or put the comment on my blog...