Twitter is a strange phenomenon. Who would have throught that a social network could have been built around sending “tweets” of 140 characters to whomever cared to listen would have such widespread appeal?

Well, Twitter, in spite of its seemingly arcane 140 character limit (and maybe beacuse of it) has been a huge success. Among it’s most fabled uses is the ability to listen to some of the online celebrities (Stephen Fry, Barack Obama and others) and listening to real-time tweets from news networks and your friends. What many haven’t realized is that Twitter is also a great professional development and professional networking tool. Open yourself a Twitter account and get networking, or promoting your business or blog.

So you open yourself a Twitter account and realize that you want some followers. Followers listen to your all your tweets. How do you find followers? You can either rely on people finding your tweets interesting (the slow method) or you actively find people with similar interests to yours, and follow them (the faster method). Very often, the people you select to follow will reciprocate and follow you.

How do you find people on Twitter with similar interests? You can subscribe to Atom feeds that search for certain phrases/keywords in Tweets. Here’s an example that looks for discussions about “internet marketing”:

• http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=internet%20marketing&hl=en&rpp=100
  • q=[the keywords], %20 is a space
  • hl=[language]
  • rpp=[#results to return], 100 max

Add that feed to any feed reader, like Google Reader and check it regularly. Choose to follow users who seem to be experts or interested in your field and many will choose to follow you. There is the beginning of your Twitter following. Simple.

You can do more with the Twitter Search API, such as looking for people nearby, tweets to/from a specific person and more. Visit the Twitter Search API for more details.