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Twitter has become a nationwide phenomenon, and like any phenom, all the Twitter talk grows quickly tiresome. But despite what you may think, Twitter isn’t just for narcissists; it’s actually insanely useful.

So let’s assume that you already know about the navel-gazing uses of Twitter—the aspects of Twitter that most people criticize when they complain about the site. Discounting Twitter altogether because you think it’s ridiculous that people tweet about what they had for breakfast is like claiming that email is useless because of forward chains. It’s a mistake, and you’d be missing out on a great tool if you let that put you off Twitter completely.

Twitter is as useful as you make it. In fact, Twitter does several very worthwhile things better than any other tool.

1. Instant, Real-Time Search Results

Search is hands down the most useful feature of Twitter—whether or not you actually participate by posting anything to the site. Consider, for example, a very trivial example: I live on the West coast, so when the American Idol results show ends every Wednesday on the East coast, it’s only 7pm here. I could wait two hours, then suffer through another hour of the Wednesday night, up-with-people variety show, but I really just want to know who was voted off. News sites move too slowly, and at one point blogs had aimed to fill this instant-answers void, but guess what: When you want to find out who was voted off Idol as soon as the results are available, Twitter is the quickest and easiest way to get this answer. Try it sometime. Within seconds of the announcement on Idol, Twitter fills with hundreds of posts answering this question for me.

The real-time search applies to so much more. If the signal on my cell phone goes out, I check Twitter to see if there’s some sort of AT&T outage in my area. If I want to know what people are saying about something important to me, I hit up Twitter. What you get is like a centralized, searchable, real-time comment-thread for everything. Yes, like all comment threads, you’ll find a good amount of crap. But that doesn’t render the entire thread worthless. Bookmark Twitter Search now and use it next time Google or your favorite blog search engine fails you.

2. Monitoring Something You Care About

Virtually every company has a Twitter account these days, which means if there’s a product you really care about, following them on Twitter is often the easiest way to stay up to date with the latest developments. But more often than not (in the context of Twitter, at least), the thing we care about most is ourselves. We’ve already shown you how to create an ego search to monitor what’s being said about you on the web, but now Twitter is another must-use tool for getting your ego fix.

Still, even if you’re not an ego-maniac, surely there’s something that you care about that you could monitor on Twitter. Do yourself a favor and download one of the free desktop Twitter clients to help you create persistent Twitter searches so you can keep track of whatever your want without always hitting up the main Twitter search page. We’d recommend checking out TweetDeck or Seesmic Desktop.

3. News Updates

We’ve been using newsreaders to subscribe to RSS feeds for years now, but newsreaders still haven’t completely caught on with the world at large. It seems less manageable to us, but many people are perfectly happy using Twitter as a tool to keep up with the latest news—which is partly why CNN has over 1 million followers. Likewise, re-tweeting (the process of copying and re-posting someone else’s tweet) spreads news like wildfire—so breaking news can reach you on Twitter a million times faster than through any of the old methods. (For what it’s worth, here at Lifehacker we have our own Twitter feed that pushes out all of our top stories.)

4. Instant Communication with Friends

This is closer to what people think about when they think Twitter. But, as I said above, Twitter communication doesn’t have to be a cesspool of “what I ate this morning” and “just flushed the toilet.” You can choose whose updates you want to be notified of and how you get those updates. Upshot: If you and your pals use Twitter well, it can be a fantastic communication tool. If not, of course it’s useless—but that’s not really Twitter’s fault. Also, if privacy is a concern, you can always protect your updates.

5. Twitter as a Productivity Command Line

Whether you want to add a new event to Google Calendar, a new to-do to Remember the Milk, or a new note to Evernote, you can do it all via Twitter. It took us a while to warm up to Twitter from a productivity angle, but this kind of integration made us admit that Twitter may yet boost your productivity, too.

6. Ask Questions, Get Answers

Provided you have enough followers (with enough knowledge), Twitter is also a powerful place to ask questions and get answers. Before I started writing this post, for example, I asked my followers what they think Twitter’s best uses are—the answers to which helped inform this entire post.

One of my favorite blog posts of 2008 came from marketing blogger and author, Seth Godin. The particular post I’m referring to actually got on his own list of favorite posts from his personal blog in 2008.

The title of the post is, ‘The Secret of the Web’. (http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/08/the-secret-of-t.html). Catchy title eh? Needless to say, I read it. In the post Seth says, “The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly.”

The tactics Seth refers to are online marketing tactics. Seth also adds that, although tactics work really quickly, “..its the strategy that is the hard part, not the tactics.”

I tend to agree with Seth on this point. Tactics can be successful very quickly, yielding tangible results. However, tactics can also fail very quickly and yield no results. For this reason, the real key for making any online business a success is to put a long-term online marketing strategy in place and stick to it.

With so many online technologies that come and go, new tactics, if tried, must be measured against something that is constant. With no long-term online marketing strategy to measure new online tactics against, you’re essentially just shooting in the dark expecting to hit your target. Short-term tactics with no strategy base can sometimes even hurt your brand or kill off customers.

Because I have tried random online marketing tactics with former businesses, I understand how frustrating this can be. I’ve also seen the other side of the coin. I’ve worked with multiple companies that have a clear online marketing strategy in place. Tactics, if they didn’t fit into the long-term strategy, were simply not used.

After seeing the success of these companies in the online realm, I am convinced that sticking to a long-term marketing strategy is key for the success of any business online.