It\’s interesting to note the parallels that there are between business social networking on Twitter and face to face business networking. I made the point in a earlier article about how Twitter could be described as targeted business networking because you can pre-empt much of the initial meeting and move straight onto relationship building much more quickly than you can do face to face.

With face to face business networking events (if you\’re smart) you\’ve already grabbed a copy of the attendee list and know exactly who it is that you want to talk to, and that\’s what I mean by targeted. The problem at face to face meetings is that rarely is the attendee list given out prior to the meeting so that you can plan but that\’s not the same as with Twitter.

The Twitter search facility has many depths of functionality that give you the opportunity to do this sort of planning and preparation up front before you start making contact with people. There are also some interesting pieces of software out there too that (if set up right) can target the sort of people that you want to engage with and automatically follow them for you.

Just a word of warning as I pass the subject, all these software solution for building followers are not the same, I\’ve found one so far that really works the remainder however behave like scatter guns and are only interested in building the quantity of your following and not the quality.

In essence with Twitter you first need to do your research as to how you want to make contact with people. One of the easiest for example is if you have a local business then you might only want to be making contact with other businesses in your neighborhood so you can do a search to pick up other tweeters who\’s location is your local town.

You can also use a facility called the hash tag which is a great device to pick up conversations that are going on in Twitter about your chosen subject. An example of this is if you do a search for #bbcqt then you\’ll pick up all the discussion prompted by a current affairs program in the UK. What if you\’re business specialism is web design, why not try searching #webdesign and see what sort of conversations are going on.

Beware however that people now use the hashtag for other things, in fact it can be used like a piece of punctuation or to distinguish between a comment to the masses and one which is meant to be at the personal level with a little humour – the sort of thing you would say behind the back of your hand.

There\’s lots of different ways of doing a search on Twitter that understanding and harnessing this sort of search facility is so essential in the modern world. It\’s corny to say it but if you aren\’t getting with it and diving in then get worried….because your competitors are right in there. This sort of technology can really bring efficiency to your relationship building, whether it will completely replace business networking I think not but it\’s certainly a complementary tool.

Author Bio: Paul Yates offers free Twitter marketing advice. He has researched many Twitter tools to find Twitter friend adder software that works and found only one that works satisfactorily.

Category: Business
Keywords: business networking,targeted business networking,business networking events,networking meeting,