The skewing mechanism of Azzalini for continuous distributions is used for the first time to derive a new generalization of the geometric distribution. Various structural properties of the proposed distribution are investigated. Characterizations, including a new result for the geometric distribution, in terms of the proposed model are established. Extensive simulation experiment is done to evaluate performance of the maximum likelihood estimation method. Likelihood ratio test for the necessity of additional skewing parameter is derived and corresponding simulation based power study is also reported. Two real life count datasets are analyzed with the proposed model and compared with some recently introduced two-parameter count models. The findings clearly indicate the superiority of the proposed model over the existing ones in modelling real life count data.