We’ve signed up a Twitter account recently. After playing with it for a while, we found twitter is really cool and useful. To be honest, we didn’t see its beauty and power for the first few days, we thought it was too simple to receive such a lot of applause from the world. I have to remind myself, however, that all great ideas are simple.

Now, we really enjoy using twitter and found some simple ways to get valuable information for our business, and here are some tips.

Read industry’s break news:

Twitter is arguably the best place to find and follow the industry’s news you care. It’s designed in such a way to avoid spam, because you can pick and mix the messages from the news providers you trust.

Keep up with your customers:

I believe you all understand the importance of customers loyalty, which would make them into your evangelists. For that reason, it would be ideal to know what they are talking about in real-time. Twitter, again, makes all these possible!

Help your colleague:

We live in a world where information is overloaded. But, we also need to get things done in an easy and straight forward way. Twitter is quick in the way of post-n-reply, which can be applied in our working environment. Got a question? Post! Got an answer? Reply! Simple as that.

Turn conversations to leads:

Twitter is a platform and a community, where you can find potential customers. If you go to search.twitter.com, and search the products/services related to your business, you can soon find people looking for help and recommendations. Bingo! Now, you can kick off the conversations with your knowledge. Please please remember, you are there to help and to build your reputation. Focus on the long-term relationships but not the direct quick sales.

Understand your competitors better:

Time to turn your attention to your competitors. It is always smart to keep on eye on them, isn’t it? Again, you can either follow them or search their name on search.twitter.com.

Some people hate their competitors and they’d like to do things to damage their competitors’ businesses, while others try to build decent relationships with the competitors by not being too aggressive. Well, it may surprise you if you respect your competitors and say some good things about them sincerely.

Follow Bizroof On Twitter

We just rolled out a new contact us form, which ensures that your messages arrive the most relevant departments via the shortest route.

Due to the high volume of messages, you may have to wait couple of hours to get replied. But, we guarantee to answer every question comes to us.

We respect your feedback and develop the system just for you. By the way, we won’t use your data for any purpose without your permission.

Google now allows us to reorder and annotate search results. If you log into google account, you can see 3 buttons next to each search result, including: Promote, Remove and Comment. But, any changes you made will ONLY be saved into your Google account and won’t affect others, at least for now.

Google obviously understand the beauty and power of human-editing community (e.g. Wikipedia, DMOZ), and they now encourage their massive user base to contribute to the search engine. Although Google haven’t directly linked their search algorithm with this new feature yet, they might do that in the future if they are able to collect solid and substentcial evidence to show human-editing leads to better search quality.

It is difficult to run a business, especially during the economic downturn. People are very careful spending their money by all means. Your suppliers start to chase outstanding invoices and your customers order less than ever.

So, it is really important to review your cash flow on a regular basis to find out your exact CASH situation.  And then, you have to dig deeper to look at “everything” could help you through the troubled economic times. If you are not cash flow positive at the moment, you need to work out a plan to achieve that asap. And one way you can do that is by negotiating prices with all your suppliers, even your broadband provider. Remember, every little helps!

Your cash flow, at the same time, measures your business performance and assesses your options for growth. Why? It is always telling you the truth and never trying to hide anything.