Can anyone tell me why so many agents spend so many hours on Twitter?

It seems a lot of agents are caught up in the Social Media hype these days and Twitter is high on their list.  Is the business they generate off Twitter predictable and duplicate-able or just a big waste of time? I have been trying to figure out if agents are really getting business from spending so many hours following people and tweeting or is it a way to avoid what they really should be doing to generate business.  That would be contacting their past clients, calling their COI and actually prospecting to locate new clients. Now the results from those activities are actually predictable and duplicate-able if tracked.

I can see a small benefit of getting a referral now and then since most agents are following other agents. Those are far and few between and very hard to build a business on. I have heard some agents say that it helps their search engine rankings which is totally ridiculous. Now I can see it would have value if you were a vendor and had a lot of agents following you. A lot of agents are looking for that magic pill that doesn’t require work and believe a lot of these snake oil salesmen 😉

Can someone please tell me what I am missing?  I really want to know. I truly think agents could be spending their time in more productive activities.

On another note: I will be in San Diego at NAR and look forward to meeting some new real estate friends to share ideas about converting more business online, SEO, social media and any other productive activities 🙂