I use twitter and have found it extremely useful for my business - getting blog traffic, making important connections, even getting clients. (I'm an attorney.)
I also use Tweetdeck to organize following lists. I am not terribly picky with who I follow back, as long as I can tell from their profile that they are a real person who is not just going to blast me with spam. You can usually tell by the following to follower ratio. Following 1000, but only 200 followers means the person is mass-adding people so they can spam them. I am at about 1,000 following/followers, but that doesn't mean I read every single thing. I have a column for people whose tweets I don't want to miss.
Twitter comes up in search engines, so if someone googles my name (like a potential client trying to find info on me), they can click on my twitter page and see a bit of my personality. It makes people more transparent, which I find that people are looking for these days. Many of my clients say that they heard about me from a friend, googled me, found my various social netoworking sites, looked at my website, signed up for enewsletter, and had been getting weekly emails from me for a while, so they felt like they knew me already.
So, I guess Twitter is just one tool in a whole web of other tools. (No pun intended.)
One thing you can do is ask yourself if your potential blog readers would be on twitter. If your blog readers are grandmas, then probably no. If your blog readers might be business owners, then maybe yes.
There are tools where you can do a search for twitterers who match a certain criteria. So for example, I live in Portland and my target market is moms. So I can do a search for "Portland Moms," and make sure I follow all of them and assume they follow me back. Then, when I'm holding a seminar for parents, or if I wrote a blog entry, I can tweet it, and they'll see it. There are also tools where you can be notified when certain groups of people tweet aboout certain topics, so that you can answer their questions. So, if anyone ever tweets about your area of expertise, you can be the one that answers the questions or comments to provide additional info.
There are even applications where you can have a tweet come through at a particular time. So, if I am holding a seminar, and I want to remind people 3 weeks before, two weeks before, and one week before, I can plug it in, and it will be tweeted when I set it for. This tool is also good for promoting you blog posts. Not everyone is going to see it if you only tweet once.
So, there's a little Twitter 101 for ya.
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Oh, and if anyone here decides that they want to try to use twitter effectively to get blog traffic or whatever, I have a ton of tips, so let me know!
