I’ve found twitter useful from a number of perspectives:

1) If you have a tarrgeted followership – i.e. one that’s interested in what you have to say – then it can drive very relevant traffic to your site. I “tweet” (hate that word) a lot of links and ideas for business development in professional services and I follow primarily people who have shown they are interested in those topics (and largely, they follow me back). When I tweet one of my own links my stats show they stay around longer on my site an dlook at more pages than vistors from either google or other social media.

2) You can make direct connections to people you would never be able to get throught to otherwise – sometimes some very senior folks. It all depends on whether the people you want to connect with are actually on twitter and your ability to find them (e.g. with twitter search, twellow or one of the other twitter directories).

3) If you actually read your twitterstream, you get notified of lots of interesting resources you’d never have found otherwise. I found the article on boosting lateral integration via your tweet for example. On the other hand findign out you’d bought a new ski helmet didn’t help me much – but it did help to put a human behind the text.

Ian