Maria Gudelis | As Seen on TV, Entrepreneur, Author, Marketing and Real Estate Expert

Twitter rose from the lowly ranks of new microblogging social networking sites swiftly. Some say an entire Presidential campaign was won partially off the viral nature of this site – but regardless of whether or not you believe that, there’s no denying it can be a very powerful method of reaching a large audience.

The problem to date has been to determine just how to single out the right people to communicate with. With the implementation of robots to add friends or auto-follow people, you never knew if those who reciprocated your follow were even interested in your products or services that you market online.

In 2009, Internet marketers learned how to get traffic to their domains, blog, Squidoo lenses and forums simply by devising a potent Tweet and sending it out to the web-o-sphere.

They learned how to personalize their Twitter profile page, including product images, tag lines, and hyperlinks to important sites. Some lucky users were grandfathered with the ability to have an animated avatar (which catches many eyes) before Twitter nixed it to the masses.

Just before the end of the year, the site created a Beta test version of list options, that supposedly wasn’t available to everyone using the site. With lists, you’re able to take the people who you’re following and categorize them, allowing you to read the Tweets of one particular group at a time rather than wade through hundreds or thousands of Tweets that might just be a courtesy follow instead of a true interest.

Biz Stone, the founder of Twitter, is going to help marketers out by allowing you to open a business account for the year 2010. It will be a paid version of the site, but you’ll get perks such as analytic tools to help you focus your message more precisely.

You can’t blame Twitter. It must be horrible to have developed such a powerful social networking site that’s become a household name and still not be profitable. That’s the primary goal of Twitter in 2010 – to make acquisitions of developments that help them make revenue for the site. As marketers, we’ll be paying the bill for things we use, but hopefully well be reaping the rewards and our ROI (return on investment) will make it well worth it.

Another 2010 forecast is that your Tweets will soon be indexed in real time on both Google and Bing. As any marketer can tell you, this is wonderful for those who are marketing trend products and services and want to defeat their competition using effective keyword-laced Tweets that result in decent conversions.