1. Twitter Increases Your Brand's Credibility Online

Twitter helps you to answer several important questions, such as:

* "Who are you?"
* "Who else does business with you?"
* "Can I trust you?"

Never underestimate the importance of answering these questions: not once, but many times.

Trust is a huge factor for any business. No matter how many brick and mortar stores you have, or how large your balance sheet, you need to focus on building trust online. Trust takes time to develop, and it's easily destroyed.

Twitter gives you a chance to show your humanity, and that there are real people behind your brand.

2. Twitter Gets Traffic to Your Best Web Content

Yes, you need Web content. But before you create content, you need to have ways to promote it. Twitter is an easy promotional tool which lets you showcase your best content, and also lets people talk about it.

3. Next Year Will Be Different from This Year: You'll Have More Competition

Competition. You have it: every business has competitors, and here's what's guaranteed -- you'll have more competition in 12 months than you have right now. Not only will your current competition pose more of a threat, you'll have a bright collection of new competitors too.

Twitter enables you to get the advantage over your competition. In 12 months, you'll have 12 months of tweeting behind you. You'll have formed new, strong relationships, as well as strengthening current relationships.

4. Mighty Google: Real-Time Search Done Right -- Be There

Currently (in June 2009) Google doesn't offer real-time search of Twitter streams. You can be sure that Google's working on making its search results pages as close to real-time as possible however.

For example, Google has just added a "Recent Results" filter to its search query results pages, which include results from the past hour.

You can also be sure that Google takes your presence on sites like Twitter into account when deciding where and when to serve up your Web content.

As Google and the other search engines evolve, you need to be on sites like Twitter.