1. Order taking – Twitter can be easily extended by businesses as an order desk.  Create an ID especially for booking orders for your products and services.  Use any of the desktop Twitter tools or, even better, use one of the available mobile applications to track orders.  No need to employ someone to manage your order desk 24/7.

Who is doing this: The Coffee Groundz that started booking orders on Twitter in 2008.

2. Polls and Surveys – Use Twitter for getting people’s opinion on your business and activities by letting them poll or participate in surveys.  You can use PollDaddy’s twitter polls which is a free service or twtpoll which is a paid service but provides advanced options.

Who is doing this: CNET, CNN, Yahoo, United Airlines to name a few.

3. Emotional Intelligence – Twitter users often share their experience, feedback and opinions about products and service they use.  Businesses can now track what is being shared about them on Twitter without spending a fortune.  There are free tools like TwitScoop and TweetBeep for tracking tweets that mention your brand.

Here is the result when I searched for Dell.

An extreme form of emotion expressed on Twitter is Unfollowing someone.  If you are already using Twitter for your business and want to know which of your messages made you lose existing followers, you can use TweetEffect that tracks the change in the number of your followers with every Tweet.  Good tool to measure the impact of your tweets.

Who is doing this: Actually anyone can do this and you can gather emotional intelligence not just about yourself but others also.  For example, using TweetEffect, I tracked the changes in President Obama’s followership and found some interesting relationships between the Tweets and followership that you can see in the images above.

4. Customer Service – Another area where Twitter can be very useful.  Provide a Twitter address where customers can send you a direct message whenever they need help with your products and services.  Track and respond to customer queries and support requests through any of the free Twitter management tools.

Who is doing this: I know of Comcast and JetBlue.  Please let us know through comments if you know anyone else.

5. Competition Analysis – Want to know what your competition is doing, what is the buzz about your competitor on the Internet, what are some of the areas that have your competitor’s customers unhappy and so on.  You can track all these things through Twitter.

Use TwitterStats and TweetVolume to find out how many times people mention your brand and your competitor’s.  These two only provide quantitative analysis.  If you are looking for qualitative comparison, you will need to make use TwitScoop and TweetBeep.

Who is doing this: Anyone, just that nobody wants to do it publicly and that’s why I don’t know of any name.

6. News, Announcements and PR – No need to hire an expensive PR agency to announce and distribute your company’s news.  Use Twitter to distribute news and make announcements.  Send a message to @MicroPR and it will be distributed to all the media professionals and bloggers who follow them.  You can also use #Twitpitch hash tag to pitch your company, product or service.

Who is doing this: Google uses Twitter to share the news stories and important announcements related to all its products and services.  Dell also shares announcements @Direct2Dell.

7. Raising capital and donations – This is something that most non-profits can make use.  I am not too sure of the legal issues involved in companies pitching for private investments through Twitter but know of at least one example of such request.  Jason Goldberg, the founder of Social Median, that was recently acquired by Xing, posted a message on Twitter soliciting angel investment.

8. Hiring Talent – If you are looking for talented people to join your business, chances are you will find them on Twitter.  Just post your requirement as a tweet and you may end up getting references from your followers or direct messages from interested parties.

Who is doing this: Sodexo USA, a company involved in food service and facilities management has a dedicated Twitter account named Sodexo Careers.

9. Special Offers, Discounts and Coupons – Use Twitter to notify people of discounts that you are offering without advertising costs.  If you wish to provide coupons to your customers, use twtQpon to create and distribute discount coupons.

Who is doing this: Dell Outlet offers deals and discounts through Twitter.

10. Manage company events – Want to invite people to your company’s event or a webinar.  Use Twitter to promote your event.  In case you want to be more organized, use CalTweet or VeVite.  These tools allow you to set up an event on Twitter, invite guests and have RSVP responses mailed to you.

Know of any other areas where businesses can save money using Twitter for managing their activities, please care to share.

If you want to be updated about more such posts and interesting small business ideas, please follow B.E.T.A. Daily on Twitter.

Twitter, the most successful startup in 2007, has changed the way people talk and communicate with the world.  It has made the world talk and pass on the message in just 140 characters.  This post is a collection of videos from the web for about using Twitter for various useful tasks and having fun.  If you are bored of reading Tutorials about Twitter or just couldn’t make things work with the written ones, watch them live and make Twitter work for you.  Even if you are a Twitterholic, you might find something new and interesting.

Learning Twitter & Twitter How-To Videos

1. Twitter in Plain English: Perhaps the most linked-to and watched video on what is Twitter.

2. How To Use Twitter: Another video on instructions for using Twitter.

3. Twitter Tutorial:  A tutorial for Twitter newbies.

4. Share YouTube videos on Twitter:  A video showing how to share a video from YouTube.com to your Twitter account using MessageDance.

5. How to Configure Google Talk With Twitter: Since you can use Twitter with Jabber client, this videos show how to configure Google Talk to be used with Twitter.

6. Group Messaging with Twitter:  This video shows how to use a project named Twitter Groups at JazzyChad website for group messaging.

7. Find Twitter Friends With Google: Locate your friends using advanced Google search.  The video might be obsolete now with Twitter’s own search engine but Google still can give more relevant results.

8. Twitter for Lotus Notes: The video shows how to use Twitter with Lotus Notes.

9. Connect Utterz with Twitter: The video shows how to add connections in your Utterz account to Twitter.

10. Manage Multiple Twitter Accounts: This video demonstrates how to easily use and manage multiple Twitter accounts for different activities.

11. Twitter with Fring: Video showing how to update your Twitter status using Fring.

12. Twitter on iPhone:  A video demonstration of Twitter iPhone application.

13. Using Twitter Within FireFox:  This video shows how to use FireFox add-ons Twitbin and Twitterbar to post messages to your Twitter account.

Getting Things Done With Twitter

14. 17 Uses Of Twitter:  A video rundown of DoshDosh’s post on ways of using Twitter.

15. Teaching With Twitter: Experiment by few professors to use the microblogging service for education.

16. Business By Twitter: A video from Robert Scoble about how Twitter is emerging as the next generation marketing tool.

17. Twitter for Marketers: Another video on how Twitter is being used for marketing and what the potential of the service is beyond its current implementation.

18. Twitter Marketing 101: A video by Web20MarketingElite showing marketing uses of Twitter.

19. Become A Twitter Power User:  This video shows how to use Twhirl, a Twitter desktop client which was recently acquired by Sessmic, to become a powerful Twitter user.

20. Twitter for Internet Marketing & Mastermind Groups: A video showing how to use Twitter to find collaborators, joint venture partners and interview subjects as well as to communicate with groups of students, clients or a mastermind team.

21. Tracking Reputation With Twitter:  This video takes a lead from Mike Arrington’s experience with Comcast and how he got support using Twitter to get his Internet connectivity back.  The video shows how companies can use Tweetscan to find out what is being talked about them.

22. Twitter Double Header: A video showing how Twitter can be practically used in emergency situations.

23. Twitter Fountain: An video showing Twitter Fountain which is an interesting application on SecondLife that visualizes Twitter public timeline in real-time.  Good to look at when you are bored of plain UI of Twitter’s website.

Twitter Fun

24. Color Wars 2008 Theme Song: Color Wars is a Twitter game.  You can find the details about the game at the Color Wars 2008 website.

25. TwitterMeThis:  This video explains TwitterMeThis which is an interesting Question and Answer game built using Twitter.  The person who answers first gets to win $5 as a prize.  You can also go to Twittermethis to participate in the game.

26. Twitter Addict: See how tough it can be to be a Twitter addict.

The last way to put Twitter to good use is following yours truly   Start following B.E.T.A. Daily and my updates on Twitter.