Twitter continues to baffle and confuse even the brightest of marketers. What’s it really good for? Where’s the ROI? And who ARE these twits? Okay, so it’s not as clear cut as Facebook or LinkedIn, but do not for one second underestimate the potential of Twitter. There are now over 200 million Twitter accounts in existence with over 280 million tweets daily. And your prospects and existing customers are among the masses.

If you’ve been struggling to find the value, one thing that you can do today to maximize your Twitter presence is to become a trusted expert answering questions that people post on the site. Simply log into your account and access the Advanced Search tool. Search for questions based on relevant keywords and using a question mark (?) in your query. For example, if you are an etiquette trainer you might conduct a search that looks like this:

When the search results pull up, click on the blue dropdown menu next to “Tweets”, changing Top to All.

Now it’s time to scroll through and find some questions to answer. When you’ve found one, place your mouse over the individual tweet and hit Reply.

Copy a condensed version of the question (still needs to make sense but allow you ample room to answer) into the reply box after the Twitter user name and type your answer directly before it as shown below. If there is room, add relevant hashtags and hit “Tweet”.

Make it a habit to consistently answer questions related to your niche. Over time, you will be retweeted, your user name will become familiar to other Twitterers and people will come to recognize you as a valued expert. It’s also a great method for organically building your following and increasing your appearance in search results.