I tried using it for years ago, but got tired of hearing my own voice, so now I use it mainly for following others - locals, political stuff, interesting people, news, etc. I should probably start following some cigar and craft beer people too.
I used to use it for work (find other people in your profession) and it worked great for that, but I haven't been doing that for a while.
Hootsuite is a good website on the laptop because you can use multiple columns. I used Echofon on my iPhone.