Greetings,
Frank

Referrals is still the most powerful driver of sales in wedding photography, and connecting with people online is an effective way to amplify one's offline marketing efforts (and to help “great work” spread wider, broader and deeper).

I've found it to be a great way to connect with people, I love to see what other photographers are up to, whether it's their professional work or personal. So I'm using twitter a lot to just connect with other photogs, see fresh work and interesting links. But also, I wanted to use it as another way to connect with potential clients.

I remember looking for a wedding photographer when I was getting married, and feeling like I was looking at a sea of total strangers. All of their photos were great, the prices were comparable, so how do you pick someone? I think social media in general (and the blog, moreso than anything else) is a great way for people to get a feel for your personality.

@MooreClick

Perhaps I was a little harsh with “If that’s all you want to do, then don’t use Twitter.” What I meant was that if that's the entirety of how someone wants to use Twitter, then I won't follow you, which is what I said with “Go ahead, but I won’t follow you.” Just my personal choice on how to use Twitter, my personal rule.

Fact is, Twitter can be effective medium for marketing: but I think (note, I think) that most people don't want to follow people that are only trying to push their work through Twitter by using it as another marketing channel. And if that's the case, then using Twitter purely as a “direct marketing channel” would not an effective use of time. But time will tell, and I'm open to being wrong.

To be honest, though, I think you threw it all away at the end. You spend the entire post telling us that there are no rules (or an infinite number of rules), find out what YOU want to use Twitter for and work towards that, etc. Then you do a complete turn-around and say if what you want from Twitter is to market your material and use it as a marketing channel, don't use Twitter. How can you tell people that after you've spent all that effort saying we can use Twitter for what WE want? I agree with you that I don't want to follow those kinds of people, but maybe some do or may otherwise find it useful.