Whatever your current web site empire looks like, Market Research should be THE activity you should be most concerned about running your online business.

Because whatever your conversion strategy is, whatever your product is like… if you don’t know who your customer is and how to reach them, it’s all a bit empty, isn’t it?

Alright, I’m preaching to the choir and all that I’m sure, so let’s cut to the chase.

So what’s the best way to get a FEEL for your market online?

It used to be just subscribing to a lot of RSS feeds in your favorite feedreader, set up a few keyword specific watches or searches, and follow what turns up.

Heck, I still do that lot and it definitely has its place in a marketer’s toolbox.

But what about in this perpetually ADD, real-time obsessed time – what is an information-starved market researcher to do?

Our good West Side Neighbors in Sweden called Twingly have just come out with something of an answer.

Twingly already had its great microblog search, which is useful in itself… but Twingly’s Channels holds a lot more promise.

A Twingly Channel on Cloud Computing, doing its voodoo...

I guess you could say Twingly Channels are to the real-time web what Technorati was to the budding read-write web of 2004/2005 or so (who, by the way, are back in a big way – report to follow soon!)

Sure, you can always do the Twitter Search thing,  but that will only give you a snapshot that moves at a speed of 100+ mph.

As a marketer, you need a much more organized approach!

Twingly collates the main stories, the comments and links attached to them, and many other useful things.

If you’d like to set up a new Twingly channel (they’re only available public for now), you need to fill out this very nicely pimped out Google Docs form.

I’m not sure if they’ll routinely approve new channels or estimate mass appeal or what… but it’s worth a shot for sure.

Nobody really knows what kind of voodoo goes on behind the scenes there, but one thing’s for sure – it’s one of the greatest market research tools out there right now.

Go check it out!

A while ago we looked at a great way to find your own content links on Twitter.

That’s great when you want to find out who your real fans, friends and allies on Twitter are.

But what if you want to do the opposite, kind of, and find out what are the hottest topics being linked to right now on Twitter – by category?

Why, then you go ahead and turn to the warm embrace of TweetMeme.

TweetMeme helps you find the hottest links on Twitter... including your own!

Perhaps you already know sites like TechMeme, who go through the trouble of mechanically listing the most popular blog posts in the blogosphere, giving you an idea what are the hot topics so you can carefully choose your own?

Well, if you want to do the same on Twitter to enlarge your influcence (and gain more relevant followers while you’re at it), then TweetMeme is the place to go.

You’ll find three specific ‘levers’ on TweetMeme to help you find the links tweeted just for your niche:

TweetMeme's three 'levers' to help you find the links tweeted just for your niche

Filter by subject matter, form of media and recency. Gives you exactly what you need for your niche.

That’s all fine and good you say, but what about MY links?

Well, one thing you can do is install the TweetMeme Wordpress plugin on your blog.

After you do that, you’ll have the TweetMeme retweet button visible, which easily allows your blog to be retweeted. The button also provides a current count of how many times your story has been retweeted throughout twitter.

TweetMeme's Retweet Box for your blog

That’s a pretty good way to show off your social media mojo on your blog, yeah?

Tell me what you think in the comments!

Sure, you can scan your @mentions on Twitter to find who have retweeted your blog posts, articles, videos and other important links you want to keep track of.

But what if they misspelled your Twitter ID? Or used a URL shortener – which is like every time…

Or, you want to make a list of all the people who have retweeted your links over the last, say… 6 months? That’s some serious work to do.

Or how about finding re-tweeters who really dig your links but didn’t include your @ID, maybe got it from somewhere else? You’d certainly want to find out about your biggest fans and start a dialog, right?

Or you just want to save yourself from wading through all those @mentions?

To save you from all that time and effort in finding your real fans and peers on Twitter, enter a superb service called BackTweets.

BackTweets - finds all your links posted on Twitter!

What BackTweets does is just exceedingly sweet: you enter a URL, push the button and BackTweets will return ALL of the links with that URL on it, in chronological order.

And here’s the really cool part: it doesn’t matter if the links have been shortened with Bit.ly, TinyURL.com or the like. It’s smart enough to retrieve all those links too.

Backtweets search results - nice and FAST!

Is there a faster, more convenient way to do this? I haven’t found another, Let me know in the comments if you have (Twitter’s own search isn’t particularly good at this just yet).

And there’s one more thing… BackTweets Advanced Search.

You can use Advanced Search to narrow down the search by Twitter User or by searching a specific Date Span.

Which comes in very handy if your site or blog is particularly huge and you don’t want to wade through pages of results.

Or if you wanted to find out all the people who supported you with retweets on a particular day, say, a launch day, and want to reward them with something special.

Or if you’re the tight-reared type who wants to find out if a particular friend ever supported you by retweeting..?

But you’re not THAT vain, are you…? Of course not!

So you’ve got your blog set up to generate revenue? – Check.

Sales pages in stellar condition and copy converting for you? – Check.

Advertising and content based promotion working for you (push AND pull)? – Gotcha.

Okay.

So where does an agile internet entrepreneur turn to find yet another platform to peddle their wares, so to speak?

Well okay – how about the Real Time crazy we’ve all been hearing so much about.

We’re all taking advantage of Twitter, Facebook and so on – so what’s new under the sun here you say?

The thing is… in order to make payments, you still need to take people away from where they like to roam… which today is undeniably Twitter.

To get around this seemingly issue, let’s take a look at a service called TwitPay.

TwitPay - Sell Stuff Directly Through Twitter

Now, you may justifiably be thinking: “what’s new about that, I’m already tweeting my product launches, content, everything”?

That was my first thought too, so let’s take a closer look!

Here’s what TwitPay does for you:

• Send money to anyone on Twitter – PayPal works in the background (format: @friend twitpay $3 coffee’s on me today)
  (before you try this, you need to follow Twitpay first and wait for them to follow you back)
• Sell digital content directly from Twitter – PDF, MP3, OGG and WAV are the formats currently supported
• Run brand promotions on Twitter (this one seems to be still in beta or Early Access program as they put it)
• Raise money for charity through retweets (this too seems to be in limited access still)

So what are some of the possible practical uses for TwitPay? Here’s a few you might run into:

• Butter up a blogger or Twitter pal whose content you really appreciate, 5-10 dollars is okay (how do you think THAT will stick in their minds about you, instead of a simple retweet!)
• Get the attention of a high profile person by tweeting them your appreciation (did DM’s ever work for this, anyway?)
  
• Thank an employee, business partner or joint venture partner (or several) for a job well done: “@ev twitpay $5 because Twitter rocks”
  
• Send out affiliate commissions for an ad-hoc Twitter-only promotion you did (it could all happen within a DAY!)
• Sell a downloadable replay of a webinar you recently did – instead of going through the hassle of setting up a web page etc. just to be of service to your people
• Sell a quick downloadable report on something topical you know a lot about
• Ride on the coattails of the trends of the day – react quickly, create a product and sell it through Twitter… and you could have an avalanche of sales just because you delivered exactly what people wanted right then and there!)
• Put your old ebooks out for sale – people who never saw your original sales page may well go for it (format: “@vendor RT2Buy http://rt2b.me/xxx” OR simply retweet the original msg)
• Run special Twitter promotions of your own products – yeah, this is the really obvious thing to do.

Of course, there are some caveats or let’s say special considerations to think of, too:

• People generally don’t like to make their purchases or transactions public (how about an option to do it via DM?)
• Then again, in some cases being public about it is a plus: charity causes and products people are “proud to buy“
• Your PayPal address doesn’t get exposed, as TwitPay acts as the middle man
• TwitPay takes a somewhat hefty 15% off the top (for RT2Buy) then again maybe it’s worth the sheer ease of selling
• You may have to deal with manual settlings somewhat – so perhaps it’s not for mass sales unless you have an assistant looking after it

TwitPay is taking advantage of PayPal’s new Platform, it is one of the first to do so, paving the way for many more innovative payment solutions to come (you can be certain ProfitHacker will report on all significant payment innovations!).

If you ask me, TwitPay is the first symptom (not sure if they’d like me calling them a symptom, but oh well..) in a move towards an even more accelerated cycle of sales: you can go from spotting a need to product to sales within a single day!

So there you have it – a way to generate quick, impulse buys through just retweeting – Paypal working in the background for you (which is genius really!)

You’re essentially delivering bite-sized content to the masses; micropayments finally make sense, hurray!

If you liked this post and the possibilities ahead it may have opened for you, follow TwitPay first, wait for their follow back, then go ahead and tweet me a latte!