Most of us are twittering by now. Fewer of us really know why.

Lots of publishers are asking: why am I doing this? What do I get from it? Is it really worth it?

To twitter effectively, it helps to have a plan.

First, who to follow? Simple: follow those you want to see following you. That means, you target your list and go after them name by name. Follow people who are interested in what you have to say. To find these people, do a twitter search by keyword; search keywords in member bios; go to members that focus on your topic and follow their list of followers.

If you have a crafting publication, search crafts and see who is tweeting about what. If you have a trade publication, search bios to find people in your targeted business. If you have a food publication, go to Whole Foods and follow their followers.

About a third of those people will follow you back. After a few days, drop the ones who don’t. You don’t want your followers to be out of ratio with those following you—that’s the kind of thing that people notice, and it can make a bad impression.

What kind of tweets should you do? That’s easy—think about your audience. You now have a very targeted list you can communicate with weekly, daily, hourly—what do they want to hear?

Despite what many seem to think, they don’t want to hear what your cat ate for breakfast. They don’t want every tweet to be a self-promotion (and they can tell if it is). And they don’t want an RSS feed of links with no copy. Come on. 140 characters is short, but it’s not THAT short.

Give them a reason to click through. That reason is going to be some useful, valuable links with a little copy showing WHY they should click through. What’s in it for them.

What do you get out of this? An increasingly loyal following of people who realize that when you tweet, you offer and deliver value. What publisher doesn’t want that?