I've spent some time researching the best ways to use Twitter, both for personal networking, and business. Twitter's a wonderful tool that can be used to help you bring more awareness to your following/customers, about you, your services and your products.

I'm not a guru, but it seems a  few simple rules, will provide you with more Twitter success and let your followers see you as leader in your field. You may find the following points helpful:

• Try to stay real by posting what you yourself would like to read. 
• When you use links to external sites and media in your tweets,  add basic accurate information about the destination -- in the first part of the tweet.
• Follow those who follow you,  so long as they appear to have a genuine interest in you or your business.
• Reply to dm's (direct messages) that  you feel are genuine. Avoid the dm's you feel are bots or spam in nature.
• Find tweets that apply to your interests (business and personal) and RT(retweet) them to your followers.
• If you are attempting to sell, make sure that your sales pitches are only to those followers who have shown interest in your products and service. Your main tweets should use a soft sell approach, if any.
• If your going to tweet your blog posts -  try to add some value, instead of simply replicating the post title. If the point is to get people from Twitter to your blog or vise versa - you have to give then a reason to make the round trip.

I think this about covers the basic principles I've managed to pick up. There are many great tools available, that will help you manage your Twitter experience. (more on that later)

Twitter is a great new way to connect online and many have built on the basic concept to enhance the user experience. I hope everyone is working on becoming better Twitter-izens.