Not sure that it’s worth the time to make Twitter part of your marketing mix? Think again.

“But we only have 1,000 followers, even if 5% click on a link, that’s only 50 visitors.”

Hold on… That’s only part of the picture – a small part – if you play your Tweets right. The real goal is to drive retweets (RTs).

This CNET article which pulls content from a post on Pingdom explains how it’s already happening.

Let’s say that just 2% of your 1,000 followers retweet your message. Assuming they have the same 1,000 followers, now your message just went out to 20,000 more tweeps. Just one more hop with the same 5% retweet ratio and 1k average followers and you’re at one million people that will see your message. Sure, some will be repeats, but even those could help increase your overall click-through rate.

50 versus 50,000

Instead of asking yourself, “How can we increase our click-through from 5% of 1,000 to 8% of 1,000?” you should be asking, “How can we get 2% of our followers to retweet and maintain an overall click-through of 5%?”

Hopefully 50,000 unique visitors isn’t going to crash your website but you get the picture. It’s not hard to imagine one more round of retweets or a slightly higher retweet ratio. Either could significantly impact your traffic. Also, remember that this can happen VERY FAST. Unlike other forms of promotion, even those with viral marketing possibilities, Tweets can catch fire and spawn a series of retweets in minutes.

By virtue of the retweet network, Twitter can be a powerful, fast-acting amplifier for information well suited to viral spread.

But it’s probably good news more than a reason to panic: although some Web sites may crash as a result, my guess is that Twitter more often will just bring Web site publishers the traffic they crave.

Want to get people retweeting for you? Learn from the best. You can use Retweetrank or other tools to find out who’s retweeted the most then check out their tweets to see why.