24

Apr

Terrific Twitter Tools Make Tweeting Easy

Posted by: Carolyn Young

By now, if you haven’t heard of Twitter then you probably don’t spend a lot of time on the internet, watching TV, or listening to the radio. It seems that it is inescapable these days – even my 86 year old great-uncle is on Twitter! Along with the micro-blogging tool’s rising popularity, there comes an ever-increasing list of websites and desktop applications that claim to analyze, organize, prioritize, and streamline your Twitter activity.

There are literally hundreds of Twitter apps (see the Twitter Wiki for a comprehensive list), but here we have compiled a short list of the tools that we currently use, and that we find make our Twitter experiences much more enjoyable…and effective:

Desktop Applications: What’s the Easiest Way to Tweet?

• TweetDeck: TweetDeck has many great features that enable the user to perform a variety of options simultaneously, within one window (albeit that window may have many columns). You can perform Twitter searches, filter your Tweets, track trends, upload pictures , record a 12seconds video, and much more. TweetDeck only supports one Twitter account a time, so if you have multiple accounts that you manage you may need to try another tool.
• Twhirl: Twhirl is the client that I regularly use since I can manage my multiple accounts within one user-friendly program. Twhirl also has a number of useful features such as live searching, saved searches, uploading pictures, tweet filtering, URL shortening, and more.

Smart Phone Applications: For Tweeting on the Go

• Twitterberry: This is the most popular Twitter application for the Blackberry, but that doesn’t make it great. The current version (0.8) leaves much to be desired – there are a ton of basic Twitter functions that just aren’t available in the software right now. But at least you can do the basics – check your Twitter feed, and easily tweet from your crackberry – and hey, it’s free.
• Twitterific: This popular application for the iPhone costs $14.95, but is supposedly far superior to comparable Blackberry apps (as are most iPhone apps).

Trend Trackers: So You Know What’s Hot

• Twitter Search: Visiting this page allows you to search Twitter for anything you enter in the search bar, but it also gives you the 10 most popular topics people are tweeting about.
• What the Trend?: Okay, so now you know the 10 most popular topics, but have no idea what they represent or why people are discussing it. This website not only lists the trends, but also provides an explanation of why people are tweeting about them. Clicking on the trend will give you the latest tweets, news, and pictures relating to the topic.
• TwitterCounter: This tool lets you see how many followers you (or anyone else) has right now, compared to the past several months. These days everyone’s all about who has the most followers (see: Ashton Kutcher vs. CNN Twitter Battle). 

URL Shorteners: Because You Only Have 140 Characters

• Bit.ly: Bit.ly is the only URL shortener that I use since it is simple and the free account tracks the statistics of my posted links. I have bit.ly as a bookmark button in my browser and when I am on a web page whose URL I want to shorten. Twhirl integrates with my Bit.ly account, too – which means I can shorten links using Bit.ly from within the Twhirl software.
• There are a bunch of URL shorteners out there, including the original tinyurl.com, and the popular tr.im. SearchEngineLand recently reviewed these and a dozen others.

Auto-Follow Tools: To Get More Followers

• Hummingbird for Twitter – this paid tool helps you increase your number of “followers,” by allowing you to automatically follow large groups of people, understanding that many of them will follow you back. The software also allows you to just as easily un-follow anyone who didn’t follow you back after a period of time. This technique of growing your list of followers is currently popular among marketers and businesses promoting themselves online. The software costs $197 as of this post, so it’s only for serious Twitter marketers trying to promote a product or service.

These are just some of the tools that help us maximize our Twitter experience – it’s definitely not a comprehensive list, and new tools seem to be popping up every day, so it will be interesting to see how different our Twitter tools post might be in 6 months or a year.