196 days, 7126 tweets…and I still don’t get it

OK. I guess I’m a little slow.

I’m one of those people who didn’t get Twitter in the first place and it was only at the urging of @respres and @gotbob during my first #rebcva that I signed on.  They were having a little session about Twitter and what it was all about and I took the plunge.  Something about a cocktail party. Anyway, I started getting followers. Hey, who doesn’t like followers?  But, they were either other Realtors (shades of Facebook!) or they were porn queens.

Now, I don’t have anything against either group, per se, but there is only so much cocktail party chatter one can make with people in one’s own profession (“Whaddya think about those new FHA guidelines?”) and the porn queens just wanted some money.  I hung in there, though, and tried to “engage”.  I was successful with some, not so much with others. And, most importantly, like Facebook, I haven’t realized a dime of real estate business from all this “engagement”. Not from Realtors (although I did get a referral from @DeanOuellette that didn’t quite pan out. Sorry, Dean.), not from porn queens, not from the myriad of tweeple who love to tweet motivational quotes, not from the gazillion marketers who want me to sign up for their program to get a gazillion Twitter followers. No one.

So. What’s the deal?  As far as I can make out, Twitter is a slow motion Instant Message Board.  If you’re on it and you happen to stay on long enough to read a reply to one of your tweets, you’re lucky.  Otherwise, I check my @ replies and see something someone left (maybe) 8 hours ago after I hopped off to, er, work.

Please fill me in here. What am I missing?