Twitter is all the rage with business folks these days, (if you’re a social media butterfly it’s been the rage for you for about a year and a half) but is it useful?

Many business owners find it a bit silly, but still, everybody’s talking about it, right?

There are many practical ways to use Twitter depending upon your online goals, but here’s one that pretty much anyone can benefit from.

Twitter has a search feature found at search.twitter.com that allows you to search through the entire Twitter universe for conversations about any search term. Right off the bat this is a great way to monitor, in very real time, everything that’s being said about you, your brand, your products, your company, your boss, or your industry. I found a chap once asking if anyone knew if John Jantsch was an honest guy – well, who better than me to answer that tweet? You can even subscribe to the RSS feed for your particular searches and read the updates on your RSS reader.

Another great use of this feature is that it allows you to potentially follow and connect with people who are talking about the same things you are interested in. So, if you set-up a search for “marketing” you may easily find other folks who are interested in the same. (Hint: if your search term is more than one word, like your name – put quotes around it. “john jantsch”)

At the end of the day most of the social media tools are about connection as much as they are about communication of anything. Use Twitter to listen and connect before you get too concerned about blasting your own message to the world.