You can combine Twitter and Google to really get some valuable marketing information from the former.

Such as keeping up on your industry:

Some of the best information shared on Twitter comes in the form of shared links. In other words people tweet out good stuff they find and point people to it using a link. I love to use a filtered Twitter search to further wade through research on entire industries, but reduce the noise by only following tweets that have links in them and eliminating retweets that are essentially duplicates – “small business” OR entrepreneur OR “start up” filter:links – this gets that job done and produces an RSS feed if I want to send it to Google Reader. Don’t forget the “quotation marks” around two or more word phrases or you will get every mention of small and business.

Click through to find a host of other search phrases that you can use to keep tabs on competitors, photos, find targets by location or profession, and more.