I believe people when they say they find Twitter valuable for connecting with clients. Personally, I haven’t seen it yet, but I still believe them.

What I do see is lots of people repeating inspiring quotes, or passing along links they find interesting. And some folks do a good job of carrying on some sort of conversation given the 140 character limit. Conversations equal stronger connections and stronger connections can equal future clients.

One thing I have found is that a link included in a tweet is an easy way to get search engines to your site. And that’s a great thing.

Let me explain…

When I post an article on one of my blogs, I usually promote it on Twitter. Almost instantly, I can see via my website stats that the blog article is getting hit by all kinds of search bots.

You might recall in a prior blog post where I said that most hits to my blog come from search results on sites like Google. That’s a great thing because then I’m getting hits to my site that I probably wouldn’t otherwise have. That exposes me to more potential clients. For a freelancer, free exposure is as good as gold.

It almost doesn’t even matter whether any of my Twitter followers read the article (although I hope they will.) The real value is ensuring that the tweet is allowing me to get “scanned” almost immediately and placed into relevant search results. That’s a lot of fantastic promotional heavy lifting for 140 characters worth of info.

While I’m here, let me mention someone worth following: twitter.com/DesignNewz

It’s not often I click on links in tweets. If I did, I wouldn’t have time for client projects. But I find myself clicking on links from DesignNewz more than any other person or group I follow.