Once you’ve decided to use Twitter for your business, using the right tools can make the entire experience much easier and more rewarding. Here are some of the top tools that I use. If you have others, please share them in the comments. Since Twittering is exploding in use, I expect more tools to be developed and to add to this list in the future.
- TweetDeck – Businesses typically have a lot of followers on Twitter (or should) and usually have a large number of people they are following (following people who follow you is a good way to connect). This can mean a large number of updates which can be difficult to scan through for the important content. TweetDeck makes it easy to monitor groups of Twitterers, keywords, and get a quick keyword cloud for what’s hot. For more info, see our review of TweetDeck.
- TweetScan – TweetScan lets you set up searches for keywords so you can monitor what is being said about your company, products, and in your industry. Monitor those searches through email, rss or on their website.
- TwitScoop – similar to TweetScan, TwitScoop lets you search for various keywords, but also gives you some graphs to see when the keywords have been popular over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days. While, TwitScoop does not have rss or email capabilities like TweetScan, you can get a nice visual representation of trending for a keyword so I consider them complementary tools.
- TwitterFeed – If you’re actively participating in the online community, you are sharing links to content other than your own – probably on many different social networks. Twitterfeed allows you to automate Twittering about those links from any social network that has a rss feed. Right now we’re using Twitterfeed to automatically tweet our blog posts and our delicious posts.
- Twellow – Twitter is a wide open frontier and it can be difficult to find people who you should be following in your industry. Twellow gives you a listing of Twitterers divided up by industry and subject area. You should consider adding your own business Twitter username if it isn’t already there.
- SocialToo – Following everyone who follows you can get tiring. SocialToo automates that process, send a direct message to each person you follow, and also gives you the ability to send surveys out through Twitter.
(pic by batega @ Flickr CC)
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