Today, we continue our series highlighting some of our favorite uses of Twitter. (Last week, we shared some tips on using the Advanced Search tool.)

Do you ever wish you had a personal assistant that could research and answer the multitude of questions you face each day? Now you can – without spending a penny. If you’ll invest a small of amount of time and thoughtfulness building your Twitter profile and network, it can do this for you.

Curious? Here are some examples:

Last Saturday, local attorney Ralph Perez posted a tweet asking for suggestions on colleges to take his daughter to visit this summer.

In just a few minutes, he had several replies.

The same day, Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers, posted this question:

And here’s a sampling of the replies he received:

And you can even take your research one step further and learn from other people’s questions. Let’s say you see another user post a question asking for book recommendations. By searching for @ replies, you can see how other users replied to the question.

We’ll try a live example.

Above is a message I posted this morning as I was writing this post. You can go to search.twitter.com and enter @kkinnison to see all of the replies from my post. (Don’t forget the @ symbol. It’s how you designate a reply on Twitter.)

Have you ever used Twitter to crowd-source an answer to a question? Comment below and tell us about it.

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While I was attending a luncheon last weekend, a good friend turned and asked me, “Did you hear that Twitter is going away?” She continued with some statistics about how the usage numbers on Twitter are dropping as proof that the service was going to disappear “like MySpace.” And at my table, some very successful professional women chimed in with agreement. “I just don’t understand why people want to talk about random things.” “Who cares where someone is?” “I don’t have time.”

So I asked how many of them had attended a Chamber breakfast recently. Most said they had. I asked how a relationship with a new contact usually began. “With general conversation,” they said. Like the fabulous new restaurant they tried for dinner last night. Or how beautiful the weather is. Or how they both have teenage daughters. Seemingly random things that build the foundation for relationships. Hmmm. Sound familiar?

Then I asked if they would love to be able to walk into that breakfast and know exactly which ten people were likely to be interested in their services. “Of course,” they agreed.

“Welcome to Twitter,” I said.

This lunchtime exchange was very similar to most conversations I’ve had with tenured professionals or business owners. They’ve heard about the buzz surrounding Twitter, but know very little about its usefulness – particularly for business. So we thought we’d offer a weekly series on the opportunities Twitter presents. We won’t deluge you with a mile-long list, but we will share one simple concept or feature each week.

My all-time favorite: the advanced search.

Are you a hairdresser looking for new clients? Or a furniture store looking to sell mattresses? Or a jewelry store?

What if you could know exactly which people in your area are complaining about their hair? Or that they can’t sleep? Or looking for a gift for their wife’s birthday?

You can.

Start by entering some of the key words related to the problem you’re trying to solve. Then enter your zip code in the “Near this place” field and adjust the radius distance to your liking.  Then just click search.

It may take a few experiments to find a combination of words that generates the pool of tweets you’re looking for.  But once you figure out an effective search, you can subscribe to the feed for your search – meaning that any tweets matching that search criteria will be automatically delivered to your reader as they happen. You now have a steady stream of potential customers alerting you to their presence each day.

Some businesses take an indirect approach and follow those potential customers, chatting about general topics to build a relationship. Others take a more direct approach and reply with a tweet referencing their solution – and maybe even a discount or special offer. Again, experimentation may be needed to determine which approach generates the best results.

But where else can you identify the specific people that have a need for the solution you offer? All in real-time and at no cost. That’s a powerful marketing tool if I’ve ever seen one.