Business Week recently provided this article, Twitter: Building Businesses Tweet by Tweet. I learned about it from Twitter via JaimeSF. It starts with a case from Chris Savage from Wistia. "Savage frequently trolls Twitter looking for sales leads for his five-person, $1 million company, which makes software that facilitates video sharing through a private network. Although Savage has been using Twitter for only a year, it's already helped him find 12 new clients..."

This is very similar to my earlier post: Central Desktop Using Twitter for Sales, Service, and Brand Monitoring Conversations that described, among other things, their 27 tweet one phone call close. There was also a post on how Filtrbox Monitors Twitter with it Own Tool Set. I have been talking to a number of small IT firms in the enterprise 2.0 space that are actively using Twitter in the same way as Chris Savage.

This is not limited to IT firms as some San Francisco-based coffee shops and bakeries have sent tweets to tell their customers about specials and one Los Angeles taco truck uses Twitter to tell customers where its location for the day. Positus, a consulting firm based in Charleston, S.C, has gotten 10 paying customers through Twitter in the first months.

Here is a creative use. BlueCotton allows customers to design shirts online. "For the past two months, two of Coffey's factory workers have used iPhones to snap pictures of completed shirts, and then to send photo tweets to customers right before shipping." The tweets have helped customer feel good about their efforts before shipping and, perhaps more importantly, the social nature of Twitter has allowed BlueCotton to win new customers who spot the designs on Twitter.

How have you used Twitter to help your small business?