[jtomlin]

Hey gang, I would put myself in the boat with a lot of you. I'm having a hard time 'getting' the value of twittering but I have seen value from it. Here's the real point:

As pointed out by Michael Arrington, I think it's most appropriate to think about twitter as a search engine. Twitter is probably leading the paradigm shift for blogging and particularly how we consume content. With traditional blogs and social networks, we subscribe to people. The problem is that the people we subscribe to don't always say interesting things...! Twitter search allows us to subscribe to content and discussions rather than to people. People are finding these types of feeds more relevant.

So how do you get the most out of twitter? You identify who your target audience is and then identify what they want to tune into. That's what you tweet about. Don't dwell on followers and following (imho), just publish interesting FYI's to your target audience and let them find you, your followers will grow. The twitter community is exploding now and you should find more value in time...

@jtomlin

[Randy Westburg]

I recently tried signing up for it. I have heard from numerous people that it can be a very effective business tool. Personally I found it very buggy and difficult to use. I can see why it is popular but have trouble seeing its use as a business tool aside from the networking aspect. Perhaps I am losing touch with technology...

[pinky121]

dont have much experience to contribute ideas on this one.

[Majenic Virtual Solutions]

With regards to Twitter and its SEO benefits there are 2 that I am aware of (although I am extremely dubious of both).

The first benefit is the fact that it enables you to generate traffic to your website/blog by embedding links in your tweets. Secondly, Twitter pages are starting to become indexed.

Would love to hear what other people' experience has been....I have only started Twittering this week myself.

[RyanRE]

@Lidia ~ I don't think that there is any SEO value to Twitter other than the possibility of viral link bait. All links (including your profile homepage link) are "nofollowed" in Twitter.

While I do think that Twitter can provide some good additional traffic to your website or blog it is not technically "SEO" because the traffic is not being generated from search engines.

[Scott.Hack]

At this point in time, Twitter just seems like a waste of time to me. I'd concentrate on Facebook in the social arena. My friends have been moving slowly away from Myspace and more and more of them are using Facebook.

[rmasse10]

still messing with it to figure it out

[svrpaul]

Played around with it, I really do not see too many benefits as far as real estate goes... Guess I could Twitter about every home I'm about to look at.... HMMM...

[katexter]

try similar services such as plurk and friendfeed, which don't go down like twitter does.

[GoGlobe.org]

seems like with twitter you have to be personally interesting, which online usually means saying really stupid and obnoxious things. not sure how much commercial value it has for real professionals.