IMO The key to making Twitter work for you as a hobbyist is to not use it as a hobbyist. Use it instead to interact with the providers as people. Become a member of the SW-client Twitter community before you begin expecting it to pay hobby-related dividends. Flirt. Joke. Don’t be a sycophant. Don’t be an asshole.
That said, for all the talk of “slobbyists,” I’ve found that Twitter is just as good at allowing provideres to reveal some ugly things about themselves through their behavior. There have been attractive ladies (who I’ve not heard any performance-related reports that would otherwise keep me from seeing them) that I have seriously downgraded on or outright removed from my provider bucket list simply because of their twitter behavior. If they knew this, I doubt they’d lose any sleep over it — but I wonder how many others have done the same.
The one thing that I, as a client, don’t care for is providers who retweet every other provider’s announcements. If even 5 percent of these retweets involved travel news that involved my city, I’d be fine with it, but they almost never do. So the signal-to-noise ratio of content that providers near me share gets worse and worse. I get that it’s supportive, but it frustrates your potential clients. There should be a balance. (Or maybe clients need to be pointed to where they can reliably find your availability info.)