Here is the quick summary:  Twitter, just use it.  Really, sign up right now.

You are not convinced?  Do you need a more compelling reason?  You can set it up in a few minutes to seamlessly integration into your website to broadcast your posts everywhere you are online automatically.  Use the built in plugins for WordPress, LinkedIn, Facebook, and every other social media account you have to share your updates with your followers automatically.

Twitter is arguably the best way to communicate with key players and customers in tech, start-ups, and many other niches.  And while Twitter may be a 160 character SMS service at its core, there are over 250 million tweets sent daily.  So you need a way strategy to filter Twitter.  Are you going to use it to find news, promote your website, build your brand, find industry events, trends/research, make connections, keep in touch with people, meet new people in your niche, or something else entirely.  Whether you are new to Twitter and want to discover what you can do with Twitter or you need to spend less time and get more done with Twitter, you will be able to refine your Twitter strategy with these 5 keys.

1. When you sign up, make sure you get upload a photo, fill out your profile, and insert a link to your website.
2. Getting your First Followers-First, let’s discuss your following strategy.  Use Twitter’s automated find your email contacts service.   This is a simple exercise that will only take a minute and you should have dozens or hundreds of your friends and associates follow you back.  Following Others:  There are two approaches to following people who aren’t already contacts on Twitter.  You can follow everyone back or you can be selective and follow people in your niche.  I used to follow all “real” people  (non-spam accounts) back.  While this can build up your followers quickly, following hundreds or thousands of people will make your Twitter stream (the Tweets of all the people you follow) too noisy to be of any practical value.  You can use Twitter lists to segment people by topic or location but it is a time commitment.  Now I really just follow people I know personally, customers, or people who have really great insights into topics I find interesting.
3. Twitter Search-You will find some really great people to follow but there valuable leads to find, news to read, and discussions to join that you will miss unless you learn to use Twitter search.  Twitter search when used with operators (in the table below) can help you discover real time discussions and news that you can act on now.  I find some of the most useful operators to be the hash (#), the minus (-), the @, the quotes (” “) and the question mark (?).  If you are using Twitter to find leads and customers, then a combination search of #yourkeyword -http ? will find you people asking for your topics.  It will probably take some trial and error to find the best hashtags (# + keyword).  Find a list of Twitter search operators at the bottom of this post.
4.  Twitter Strategy Implementation-Now that you’ve found the best hashtag and keyword operator combinations with Twitter search, wouldn’t it be nice to save and access all of these searches automatically?  The problem with using Twitter.com directly for lists, @replies, and search is that you have to jump between multiple screens and you can’t save your favorite searches.  Tweetdeck elegantly addresses these issues.  You can set and save your favorite Twitter account settings and then view all your saved searches, @ replies, and lists all from one screen.  I use Tweetdeck as my Twitter dashboard to save my favorite searches, lists, and @ replies quickly from one screen in a multi-column layout.   I personally use the Tweetdeck web app and iPhone app to manage my Twitter account.    Tweetdeck has a nice plugin for the Chrome browser if you like using it on you computer.
5. Manage Flitter-If you started following everyone but realize you have many dead or spam accounts, Manage Flitter will help your find accounts don’t have profile pictures, aren’t following you back, or are inactive, it will allow you to sort on these groups of your followers and unfollow them.  It is free to use.

Do you have comments or questions?  Let’s discuss them below.

Search Operators

Operator	Finds tweets…
twitter search	containing both “twitter” and “search”. This is the default operator.
“meet up“	containing the exact phrase “meet up”.
love OR hate	containing either “love” or “hate” (or both).
beer -root	containing “beer” but not “root”.
#haiku	containing the hashtag “haiku”.
from:zachsbuzz	sent from person “zachsbuzz”.
to:techcrunch	sent to person “techcrunch”.
@zachsbuzz	referencing person “zachsbuzz”.
“meet up” near:“NYC”	containing the exact phrase “meet up” and sent near “NYC”.
near:NYC within:15mi	sent within 15 miles of “NYC”.
superhero since:2010-12-27	containing “superhero” and sent since date “2010-12-27″ (year-month-day).
ftw until:2010-12-27	containing “ftw” and sent up to date “2010-12-27″.
movie -scary	containing “movie”, but not “scary”, and with a positive attitude.
flight	containing “flight” and with a negative attitude.
traffic ?	containing “traffic” and asking a question.
hilarious filter:links	containing “hilarious” and linking to URLs.
news source:twitterfeed	containing “news” and entered via TwitterFeed