Let’s face it, as a business tool twitter gets a lot more interesting when you are following people who have conversations and point to content that you find relevant for your business or industry. But, on the surface, finding people related to your business can prove a little challenging using the built in twitter search tools. You can easily use the advanced search features to find people by geography and those using obvious industry terms in their tweets, but there’s a lot of data missing from this kind of search.

Enter services that allow you to focus on search by profession, or at least keywords, in bios. In addition, these tools return results with user snapshots that provide information about a person’s number of followers, tweet activities and recent tweets, making it much easier to determine if this is someone you might want to follow. With a couple tools you can even dive in and learn more about the people a person is following, adding yet another layer of information.

Here are three tools that can help you locate twitter followers by profession or professional interests.

• TweepSearch – this new, free tool from Damon Cortesi, who also created TweetStats is my current favorite as it seems to have the most flexibility in terms of search and sort.
• Twellow – this service from WebProNews was the first of its kind back in the day (what’s that about 9 months ago) and is more like a directory than a search tool, but I still like way it puts people into categories like a phone book.
• Twitterrel – a fairly new offering and focused tweet search to find people talking about related topics.

Image credit: ronin691

style=”margin-top: 10px; height: 15px;”>