One thing that you must do when you are using Social Media in your marketing mix for your business is to stay on top of current news, trends and events as well as what others are saying. You definitely want to make sure you listen for any discussions regarding your products or services or those of your industry as well.
Twitter can be used as a research tool to help you find this information. One way to do this is to use the basic Twitter search found at http://search.twitter.com/ or to use another tool that may make searching a bit easier and more organized for you.
Here are 5 Twitter Search Tools that may help you get the job done:
ReSearch.ly: a Twitter search tool designed to help marketers and businesses in general find the Twitter users that matter most to them. You can search tweets around specified keywords and filter results to show tweets from followers. You can also break the tweets down into segments.
Tweefind: this Twitter search tool sorts search results by user rank. Tweefind search results link the users name for you.
Tweetzi: a Web-based Twitter search tool that lets you see Tweets as they happen – in real time.
Twazzup: an online Twitter search tool that helps you search the news and filter out conversations.
Icerocket: a social media search tool that provides results from Twitter, MySpace, blogs and the Web. Twitter results are hyperlinked to the user’s main Twitter profile page.