After a couple of days out of the office I’m finally catching up on my Google Reader.  Mashable, one of my favorite sites, always comes through with great social media tips.  Twitter is definitely getting its fair share of airtime these days so for the Twitter obsessed, here’s a couple of options for searching Twitter to find what you need or want.

6 options for searching Twitter –

• TwitterSearch – this one seems to be the most common as it is hosted by Twitter. Results show the sender’s avatar, a link to the original tweet, and a link to Twitter.com to reply…

• Twazzup – this is Twitter Search on steroids. For any given query string, you can see results down the left column that are updated in real-time.

• Tweetzi – Perhaps the best element it has that neither of the above applications do, is the ability for real-time playing and pausing. See the blue “Play” button? If you click it, you can watch your trending topic gather steam; and you can hit Pause whenever you want.

• Tweefind - If you want a basic search utility, Tweefind is it.

• Twitterseach/Zeitbase – looking for something really simple, this is it!

• Flaptor – the key difference here is an RSS link, one click and you can get an RSS link of your results.

Of course you can find screen shots and more details of each of these on Mashable.  Thank you Mashable for the keeping us up-to-date and in the know on our ever changing world of social media!

Are you using any of these to help with your lead generation efforts?  If so, please share.