Twitter: Your Personal Research Assistant

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.

RalphP Twitter Post

In just a few minutes, he had several replies.

Twitter Reply 1

Twitter Reply 2

Twitter Reply 3

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

Hyatt Twitter Post

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

Picture 10

Picture 11

Picture 12

Twitter Reply MH 3

Twitter Reply MH 1

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.

KK Twitter Post

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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