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By John Tozzi

Elite Tweets

Twitter lets you listen to and join in conversations that were never public before. For entrepreneurs, it's a promotional tool and an opportunity to learn from the best through fortune-cookie-size missives and links that can change the way you think about business and life.

But it can be a fire hose of information, much of it banal, that may overwhelm busy business owners. The trick to making Twitter work for you is to follow people who will make you smarter and point you to links that will help your business. With the help of our own crowd of Twitter followers, we selected 20 people for entrepreneurs to follow on Twitter. Then we picked a choice tweet from each to show why.

Some are Twitter celebrities, but others are less well-known. We hope you find the list useful and discover at least one new person to follow. If you think someone made our list who doesn't belong, or that we missed someone who does, let us know in comments or, of course, on Twitter.

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