Twitter is only powerful if you don’t waste a lot of time there. Let me amend that.
Twitter is a great tool for managing existing customer relationships. Spend as much time there as you want if you’re using it to manage an existing field of active Twitter users who are your customers already. As far as cold contact, Twitter is a good (not great) tool for marketing, so long as you don’t spend a lot of time on it.
Because if you’re trying to market yourself without tools, twitter will seem like a total waste of time, and it actually CAN be very unproductive if mishandled.
A lot of you have given up on it as a marketing tool. Even though it can pay off. Used properly, it is a great tool for bringing new people to you and your products or services. And by used properly, I mean finding a way to set it and forget it. Finding a way to not have to manually wander Twitter, post tweets, etc.
I wrote a list of Twitter marketing tools out last year – and if you’re going to use Twitter, get yourself a power tool. Wasting seventeen hours a month (on average) of your business time is FAR more expensive than spending an hour setting up a system that you can check on and skim over the details of for just a few minutes a day or once a week in a pinch.