Is Twitter really that helpful in promoting your business?

I am on twitter, and I like to post my articles daily, and I submit them to different social networking places, so that I can get as many people to come to Creative Beacon as possible to read my new article. I am sure everyone does that on a daily basis. The thing is, with all of followers and all the other people that are following other places, I have to wonder exactly how effective posting links to my articles on twitter really is. When I do an analysis of my traffic, Twitter rarely comes up. Am I getting lost in the shuffle? Are other people experiencing this? Is there something that I am doing completely wrong?
You have to ask yourself how you stand out from the crowd? Do you only have a few people following you? You also ask yourself what your purpose for using Twitter is. Do you want potential business from Twitter? Are you trying to spread the word about new products by posting tweets to your product site? One way I have found to gain new followers, is to look for relevant people to follow. Simply going out there and clicking follow on every single person out there pay get a large payback in followers, but is that going to overrun your page with their tweets? Do you want their tweets on your Twitter page?
Another big thing to think about is how active you are. If you are on all of the time, then it will pay off more for you than if you are only on once a week or once every couple of days. When it comes right down to it, you have to be able to budget your time between Twitter and the other social networks, as well as being able to get some work done as well. You can’t spend all of your time on social networks, unless that is your only job. I have heard of some major corporations hiring people for the sole purpose of tweeting, posting on Facebook, and others. You have to decide for yourself how much you want to get involved in social networking, as well as figure out how much it is actually paying off. If it isn’t, then you definitely don’t want to waste your time doing one thing that doesn’t yield much return. For me, I definitely use Twitter, but I don’t put all of my eggs in one basket. i like to spread them around between as many places as possible.