Twitter as marketing tool

Yes, I do use twitter, professionally and personally. My experience is positive, as with most other tools. Key is to know what it is good for, and whom you are targeting. The cost per referral per twitter usually is very high, so the right target group is extremely important.

1. I think twitter is good for 1 to 1 marketing. As I am looking for a new job, I try to connect via Twitter, addresses are easier to find not as intrusive as an email, a little personal ticker. Though this can be kept up only for a limited time and very few people with all the other things to do.
   
2. Another way is to automate twitter and to just push out latest news, prices, bargains, and have a huge audience listening to that. After all the stats I've seen, I am not impressed.
   
3. Next reason to twitter would be to ride the hype, been known as someone using 'social'. This means on the other hand, objective is to minimize your efforts. One way to do that is using your PR person to post daily news snippets on twitter, although in bigger corps that might be difficult and still time consuming because they often need a release by product manager and legal.
   
4. A very different way would be to compare your disti (double opt in!!!) with twitter and then bridge the time between newsletters with a tweet every now and then or to inform them on a launch of a site or parts.
   

I am very skeptical about a good ROI, and I think for most use cases there are better ways to connect. But as can be seen here, depending on target group and objective there are some success stories, and I am sure there are many other good ideas and successful projects out there.