Social media
9 Twitter Tools You Should Be Using
Filed under: Social Media, Twitter
Without too much jibber-jabber, these tools should be in your inventory if you want to tweet efficiently (trust me, you do). By the way, most of them are free to use.
1. Timely
Timely is a browser application that let’s users schedule tweets. It also tracks the links via bit.ly and has a bookmark extension which allows you to tweet (or add to queue) the page you are currently on. Use it to distribute tweets evenly throughout the day. This is great for tweeting out resources, articles, how-to’s, etc. For time sensitive news, tweet them as you read them! If you don’t like Timely, there’s always Buffer which is very similar in terms of functions. 
2. Followerwonk
When using Twitter you should be figuring out how to find influential people in your industry and connect with them. FollowerWonk is there to help you simplify the search and analytical part. For example, you can search Twitter users by what they are saying in their bio (certain keywords for example such as “social media marketing”). Moreover, you can segment them by the amount of followers they have, how much they tweet, etc. 
FollowerWonk also lets you analyze your Twitter followers. With this tool you can find out how influential your current followers are, how many followers they have, etc.
3. Twittercounter
Twittercounter lets you monitor and benchmark your twitter stats against others. Twittercounter’s free version features statistics about followers, people you’re following and tweets. Twittercounter is very useful for quick benchmarking. 
4. Klout
While Klout isn’t exactly analytical and only Twitter-specific, it will still give you some insight into how influential your peers are. Klout is useful for finding other likeminded users, who converse on the same topics as yourself.
5. Twentyfeet
Twentyfeet provides their users in-depth Twitter analytics about lists, followers gained-lost, tweets made, etc. Of course, you can use Twentyfeet for Facebook and Youtube analytics as well, among other things. 
6. Twitter Advanced Search
There’s a good chance that your brand or the keywords related to your industry are being mentioned on Twitter. Then again there is a lot of spam and self-promotion that you want to filter out. This is where Twitter Advanced Search comes into play. Twitter advanced search lets you search by exact phrase, filter out words that you don’t want to include, search by hashtags, language, filter content by positive and negative interactions, filter out questions, etc.
You can even filter out web links that are usually people promoting their own content. For example, you are interested in conversations about social media marketing. More particular, you are interested in all of the questions people are asking regarding social media marketing. Also, you want to filter out all of the links. This is what you do:
Which will result in something like this:
Now that you have found some conversations, see if you can jump in and add anything to them. For example, if someone is asking a question regarding your field of expertise which you know the answer to, you should help them out by replying to their tweet. This is a great method to influence people – you are actually helping them in one way or another.
7. HootSuite
HootSuite can be used for scheduling tweets, monitoring specific keywords and Twitter Advanced Search results, your mentions, etc. To do that, just take your search string which you got from Twitter Advanced search (such as social media -http:// lang:en ?) and just copy-paste it as a new HootSuite stream.
8. Friendorfollow
Friendorfollow is a simple tool, which ables you to find out who unfollowed you on Twitter, which users that you’re following you aren’t following you back and which users are following you that you aren’t currently following.
9. Nearbytweets
Nearbytweets is very useful when you are searching for location based tweets. This is exactly how it works – you add a location and a specific topic (keywords) if you like. After that the software prompts tweets coming from that specific geographical location. You can also save your searches which is always helpful. 
Got another great Twitter tool to add? Please leave a comment below!
Posted on: January 19, 2012
I didn’t know about the friend or follow tool. That is cool. What do you like to use for your Android if you have one?
Thanks for your comment, Brett. Good question – I’m not sure but i’ll scoop around as I’m using iOS myself.
Thanks for getting back. Yeah I am still trying to find the best option for it, still using Hootsuite but think there might be a better way.
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