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Top Tools for Business Twittering

toolsbategaOnce 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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TwitScoop for News & Business Intelligence

twitscooplogo2Want to know what’s hot on Twitter right now?  TwitScoop gives you a quick snapshot of the top words in a tag cloud that updates every 20 seconds.  Hover over any of the words to get a view of the last 5 tweets with that word highlighted.  Click on a word to get a graph of its usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If you see an interesting tag cloud, click the “Tweet this cloud” button to save a snapshot of the page,  with the option to send a link to Twitter (its kind of like freezing time).  Here’s a link to the snapshot I saved of the twitter cloud.  A widget is also available to add the hot trends tag cloud to your blog or website. Or subscribe to TwitScoop on Twitter to be updated with links to top events.

For more in depth results, choose a keyword or username to search for.  Twitscoop will give you an overview of the tweets which you can click on to get more details – the last 20 tweets with the keyword highlighted and a graph of the usage over the past 6 hours, day or 3 days.  If there are new results, Twitscoop will periodically update the page with a reminder to refresh to see new results (which doesn’t interupt your current research). Click the “Tweet these results” button to save your results, giving you a link or an option to send a link to Twitter.  For examples, this is a link to the results for “social” that I just investigated.

TwitScoop is good tool to get a quick view of what’s going on or for research into what has been said about a certain topic (if it was within 3 days).  Unlike TweetScan, there isn’t an RSS feed to subscribe to results for periodic updates, but TwitScoop’s graphing capabilities can give you good information of how a topic is trending.

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TweetScan for Business Intelligence

tweetscanlogoTwitter can be a powerful tool for getting your message out, but it also can become part of your business intelligence arsenal.  TweetScan can help you keep track of what is being said about your company and products and get updates via email, rss or on their website. You can scan up to five phrases for daily or weekly delivery.  Best of all, there are no ads or spam in the emails. It also can be used to check for lost replies and direct messages. TweetScan’s homepage has a keyword cloud representing hot topics on Twitter.  You can also search for specific keywords by particular users.

Using TweetScan for business intelligence may take a bit of experimentation.  Obvious keywords are your twitter username, company name and any brand names for products or services.  Less obvious keywords are those which may represent hot topics in your particular industry.  For those, try looking at industry blogs, forums and publications to see what’s hot and then use the TweetScan search functionality to see what people are saying about it.

Obviously this type of business intelligence works best if your industry has a large number of Twitter users.  But it can still be useful for keeping track of general industry topics.  Twitter’s usage is also growing fairly quickly since it easy to tweet from mobile phones, browsers and desktop applications.  From a business intelligence standpoint, it is a rich environment for research because Twitter users tend to be actively engaged in the community (even if they are only broadcasting and not interacting).

If you use Twitter for Business, please share in the comments how you keep track of conversations and important topics.

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