With all the hype regarding Twitter, it may be confusing to figure out whether using Twitter will ultimately effect your business’s bottom line. I recently came across this cool article which summarizes 15 key ways to use Twitter in your business, based on the book Twitterville by Shel Israel. Here are some examples:

1) Communicating with Customers/Humanizing Your Business- Giving your customers the ability to talk with someone in your business is an excellent means of bolstering customer service. It’s also much easier than expecting a customer to pick up a phone and call your service line. Using twitter to facilitate interaction also adds a human element to your business, whereas depending on your industry, there may be little means of contact otherwise.

2) Information Seeking and Sharing- Twitter can be a fantastic alternative means to research or addition to search engines. Searching by hash tags has grown increasingly popular, and even Google has noticed, implementing new strategies to integrate online communities into search results.

3) Networking- Finding people on Twitter can be a fantastic segue for future relationship building and partnerships. Depending on your networking goals, whether it’s job searching or searching for potential job candidates, Twitter serves as an online screening process that allows you to see what they think is worthy of sharing.