Social Media has became extremely popular in the last few years. Social Media sites such as Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and YouTube are growing faster than any other type of social communication.
Well, after using it for a few months I've developed a list of the 5 benefits that you will get by using twitter :

1. Popularity- I'm not a big fan of doing something because 'everyone else is' but, using something that is very popular on the web is smart from a traffic standpoint. Twitter gets a huge amount of traffic that can benefit your site in a very positive way if you link to your site in your profile.
2. Good for SEO- There are a few tricks that will help your Twitter page gain popularity (Google Page Rank), if you look at some of the more popular people on Twitter you will notice that their page rank is very high. For example, one of the most popular users on Twitter 'Biz Stone' has 125,801 people following him and a page rank of seven. If your Twitter icon makes it onto their page, your own Twitter page rank will skyrocket and then be passed on to the site listed in your profile.
3. Easy Updates- You can easily update your Twitter page using a cell phone. The benefit here is that you can keep fresh, relevant content on your site at all times. Since Twitter will only allow only 140 characters in a post, you can text a post in from your cell phone very easily. The more often that you update your Twitter page, the more likely that people will come back and see what you wrote.
4. Reaching New People- Twitter makes it possible to reach people that you would have never been able to reach, and it doesn't cost anything. Think of Twitter as a massive promotion service that helps to market your product or service for nothing. Additionally, many of the people using Twitter that click through to your site VIA Twitter are not into the 'advertising thing' so you would have not reached them anyway.
5. Directing Traffic- It's all about the traffic! If it wasn't for Twitter directing traffic to your website it would be useless. This is in fact the key benefit when using Twitter, getting traffic to your own site. As a practice I keep very good tabs on the visitor logs on my sites, after using Twitter for a month or so I was pleasantly surprised how much traffic that you could bring in using their service.

If you are 'on the fence' about Twitter, give it a shot, it's free and makes sense from a practical standpoint.