Tweeting for ideas

John Tozzi asked the 1,300+ people who follow BusinessWeek’s small-business staff on Twitter @newentrepreneur for recommendations of entrepreneurs who give good tweets. His list of 20 people every entrepreneur should follow on Twitter contained some names even he didn’t know. (There’s also a handy sidebar about Twitter lingo.)


“Twitter is growing explosively, and it’s increasingly seen as a place where businesses should have a presence. But it’s easy to get lost,” John says. “We thought picking a mix of 20 people who consistently point to interesting ideas and resources for entrepreneurs would be valuable for readers.”

Today’s Tip: Get your readers involved, especially when you’re producing a service piece like this one. Social media sites make doing so a lot easier. Here's a primer on how to use Twitter as a journalist.

“A top-down list just selected by reporters and editors will be weaker than one that considers ideas from outside,” John says. He says several reader suggestions made it to the final list.

The graphic display online is also clever: a slide show showing choice tweets from each of the 20. However, some users commented they found it too slow to click through the slides, and they would have liked a list, presumably with hyperlinks.

[Photo courtesy of BusinessWeek]