Twitter is among the most used social networking sites today aside from Facebook. It allows users to sent,receive and share messages that include links via tweets. With almost 110M tweets/day that will for sure no one can ignore kind of traffic.

Twitter – no shortage of business opportunities

It is a perfect lead generation tool for internet marketers since Twitter allows easy conversation where you can suggest to someone and end up making profit. Things like this leads to business opportunities.

The short cut to generating leads on Twitter

Browsing twitter to find lead is hard but through use of third party tools it shortens the distance be you and the prospects. The following are the leverage:

Twitter advanced search

Using the basic search function lets you save tremendous amount of time on searching tags that helps you track your online business reputation as you look at the response to your tweets. However using the advance search function is what we should take advantage because it lets you search by geographical location. It lets you see who is saying what in your area. The data here is in real-time that can be develop into business opportunities.

When you look at the advanced search form, you will realize that it is quite simple to run a search around a prospective lead that you might have identified.  You can also use Twitter’s “search operators” and use the examples to come up with your own searches. Let us say you want to find out who wants your services in Lawrenceville, GA, you would create a search based on those terms or search operators.

Being responsive is the key 

Twitter is where people ask questions, share opinions, requirement and it up to the marketer to utilize these tweets. If someone is looking for something, they would be pleased to have someone respond to their need, to identify, filter and respond to people asking questions or complaining.  This becomes even more valuable if it is someone from their area. As a marketer, you can plan and set up a series of tweets that could very well convert into hot leads on a daily basis.  
Remember, though, that you must take care to see that people don’t consider you a spammer. Instead, identify your niche and target people in that segment by triggering an interesting conversation and being helpful, eventually generating leads.

Not just leads, but a whole network 

Generating business leads from Twitter, also bear in mind that you can also build a community around you that could yield business partners for different aspects of your business that you could work with.

RSS feeds can be a boon

You can also use and subscribe the RSS feed from every search that you run. The RSS function keeps your searches well-organized, helping you respond to the ones you find lucrative and follow-up.

The RSS function can be use to republish the results from your search. If you happen to be planning an event, you can create a buzz around it by doing this. You can create a #hashtag that is specific to your event, run a search on that tag and get the RSS feed. You can then use Feedburner’s BuzzBoost feature under the Publicize tab of your Feedburner feed to publicise the dynamic feed on your site.  It is easy.

If you would rather do this right from your browser, use Tweetdeck to see the real time search results on your desktop.

This is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to leveraging Twitter for lead generation.