Watch my latest FREE webinar where I cover 7 Essential Tips for Generating and Retaining More Business Using LinkedIn? You can leave your feedback at my Marketing Mentor Facebook Page

I’m noticing more and more people migrating to Twitter in the recent months – it’s one of the microblogging applications where you can post a comment of just 140 characters or less.

If you missed our recent podcast on Twitter you can access it here.

You can follow me on Twitter here.

I’ve found Twitter a great tool to quickly get a summary of what people in my network are up to, a terrific source of tips and tricks and I’ve also used it for research to ask questions.

Donna Papacosta is also using Twitter to help her create her wonderful Trafcom podcast. She recently she sent a Tweet to her network recently about the importance of creating shownotes for your podcast and her most recent show includes their comments and thoughts (if you are a newbie podcast producer, it’s definately worth a listen).

However it’s sometimes difficult to follow the thread of the conversation on Twitter or to quickly research on Twitter. That’s where these great new platforms come into use:

1. Tweetscan – a real time search engine for Tweets
2. Quotably – where you can follow the conversation online on one page – just type in the persons Twitter ID to see what they have been writing about recently – as an example you can see my Tweets here
   
3. Twitter on Alltop - the news aggregation site Alltop which I wrote about recently has the Tweets of some of the most prolific users of Twitters listed
4. Twitter Summize – probably my favourite tool for researching on Twitter as you can search under key words, search for  Tweets from a user, search for Tweets to a user, search for Tweets referencing a user and even translate the Tweets into a number of languages.

Next to Google Alerts, and Wikipedia, I’m finding Twitter a great resource for online research. What online research tools do you prefer? How have you been using Twitter?