Much of Twitter is about communication with your peers and meeting new people. I’ve seen many social media marketers claim that in fact conversation is the only thing that matters in Twitter.

I won’t go into detail about it in this post, but no matter what people say, marketers can only track numbers. And without tracking, there is no way to measure how effective social media is to your business.

Based on the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter still continues to grow despite outages and other issues. Nielsen reported in October 2008 that Twitter is growing as much as 343% in 12 months.

Twitter’s growth and the ability to drive traffic via Twitter is two different things, but Jason Calacanis, for instance, blogged that Twitter was sending over 20,000 people a month to his web site Mahalo.com.