A Useful List of Twitter Tools

Twitter’s immense popularity has resulted in many hundreds of tools and applications to help manage a person's tweets and accounts. Many are free or inexpensive and new ones seem to keep appearing every month.

Regardless of whether you are using Twitter for business or pleasure, there are a bewildering variety of tools that you can use to enhance your experience or help you to work more efficiently. Popular Twitter tools allow you to track the links you share, schedule tweets, welcome and manage new followers, follow and unfollow accounts and so on. Here is a list of popular and useful Twitter tools. It's far from complete, but it should help you to get started.

TweetBurner – Track the links you post on Twitter.

TwitterContd – Allows you to use more than 140 characters, upload photos and
shorten URLs.

Tweepler – Organize your followers.

Monitter – Monitor keywords on Twitter.

TwitterToolbar – Provides access to a variety of convenient tools.

TwitThis – Add this button to your website so visitors can easily tweet about your company.

Trendistic – View trending topics on Twitter.

CoTweet – Helps companies to reach customers, multiple accounts and users.

Twitter Gallery – Free Twitter backgrounds and themes.

twtQpon – Offer coupons to your followers.

Twitoria – Find followers that haven't posted recently.

Twiggit – Updates your Twitter stream with your latest Diggs.

BubbleTweet – Add a video welcome to your Twitter page.

TwitterHawk – Targeted marketing to find people tweeting about a specific topic and location.

TweetBeep – Keep track of conversations that mention you, your products, and your company.

TwitPic – Share photos on Twitter.

Twitter Karma - Makes it easy to unfollow people who don't follow you back.

Following Tips For Social Networking Sites

It can be exciting to get started on a social networking site. However, this excitement can be short lived if nobody is following you. You can start by following your friends (If you have any on that site) and inviting them to follow you. This may be enough for those who just want to share thoughts with friends and family.

Most people, though, will want a broader social experience. This is especially true if you want to promote something like your business, website, art, or music. In this case, you will want a lot of followers to hear what you have to say.

Of course, you could rapidly follow hundreds or thousands of people in the hope that some of them will follow you back, but that probably isn't the best strategy. You would likely find that only a small percentage would follow you back and that many of these will be automated accounts that are unlikely to read what you have to say. This is also a favorite tactic of spammers and may damage your reputation.

It is better to take a slower and more deliberate approach to following. Before following anybody, you would be wise to pay attention to your profile by including a picture and a brief description of your interests. It can also be helpful to make a few interesting posts so people will have a good idea of whether they want to follow you.

You can then carefully start following people who are likely to want to follow you back. Most social networking sites have a search function that you can use to find people that are related to your interests. Some sites even allow users to place labels on their profiles to make it easier to find people who share your interests. Another approach is to find an active user that is related to you niche and follow his or her followers. It's likely that they would also be interested in what you have to say.

Another method for finding suitable candidates for following is to pay attention to their following count to follower count ratio. If they have a lot of followers, but only follow a few people, then they probably have good information, but are unlikely to follow you back. If they follow many more people than follow them, then they might be a spammy, low quality account that you would want too avoid, even if they are likely to follow back.

I usually look for high quality accounts that follow a few more people than follow them. These people are often interested in making more connections, but are still concerned about quality. Following these people can be a great way to begin building your social network. Eventually, you should begin to have more people following you first.

It's also a good idea to pay attention to your own following to follower ration. Following a few more people than follow you can be like an invitation for others to follow you based on the assumption that you will likely follow them back. You may have to occasionally unfollow some people in order to maintain an appropriate ratio. You may as well unfollow the ones who aren't following you and who don't provide much value. Just be careful to not follow and unfollow people too quickly. This is suspicious behavior and can even get you banned on some sites like Twitter.

I recommend taking a little time to decide what you want to get out of social networking and develop a plan that is compatible with your goals and how you want to be perceived by the public.

How Important are Targeted Followers?

Some people have many thousands of followers on their social networks, but have little success promoting their website or business. Others have a much smaller following, but do a much better job of creating excitement for their product or service.

Clearly, the quality of your followers is very important. What isn't as clear is how to get good quality followers. There are various strategies that have their advantages and disadvantages.

For example, many people use automated programs or manually perform searches to find people to follow based on keywords in their profile or posts. It is assumed that many of these will then follow you back because they are probably interested in what you have to say. This is a very useful strategy that would likely work well for any serious marketer. However, it's not a magic bullet and has some drawbacks that are worth considering.

Suppose your niche is Internet marketing. It would be relatively easy to follow a lot of Internet marketers. This would be a good idea, but by itself it's unlikely to get you the results you are looking for. One problem is that most of your followers are probably more interested in selling you something than in buying from you. They are probably also more interested in broadcasting their messages than in reading yours. It's still a good idea to follow these accounts because people who are interested in buying items related to Internet marketing might find you based on your connection with other Internet marketers. It will just take some time for this to happen.

In a strategic sense, it's helpful to look beyond individuals and also look at a person's connections. For example, if I was looking for a job, I would probably talk to a certain friend of mine. It's not because I would expect him to offer me a job. It's because he is very well connected and would likely be able to steer me in the right direction. I would probably also talk to him if I wanted to sell something, even if I knew he personally wouldn't be interested in buying it.

These kinds of people can be very valuable even if they aren't directly relevant to your specialty. It's not too hard to find people like this on social networks who are active, intelligent users and have good connections. If you follow them, it's reasonable to expect that some of their followers will end up finding and following you.

It's not uncommon for a specific niche to become overheated with a lot of people connected to each other, but not well connected to those outside that specific community. Even worse, that community may have a lot of sellers competing for only a few buyers. This can be a danger of over targeting followers. If you use a little imagination, you may be able to think of other niches that are indirectly related to yours where you can build a few valuable connections that can grow over time. In this way, potential customers can more easily find you. Some of them may not give any indication that they are interested in what you have to offer by just their posts or comments.

You will probably want to avoid only discussing your specialty. It can be helpful to also post items of a more general nature that appeal to a broader audience. This may cause some to like you enough to become customers. Even if they don't, they may form valuable intermediate links between you and others who want what you have to offer.

In review, it's valuable to use targeting techniques when searching for followers, but it's also important to not overlook the marvelous, random connectedness of social networks that can build valuable relationships in unexpected ways.

How to Post to Multiple Social Networking Sites at the Same Time

Do you have a presence on more than one social networking site? If so, you might be interested in learning how you can save some time by having your messages appear on all your sites without manually posting multiple times. Or would you you like to use multiple social websites for promoting your business but are reluctant to do so because you are afraid it would be too much to manage.

There are many ways to save time by integrating multiple social profiles. I only intend to discuss a few that have been helpful to me. I will focus on how multiple sites and services can be used together to accomplish your goals. I won't focus too much time on the technical details that can be researched at the help sections of the individual websites.

Let's consider a simple example. Suppose you have a Twitter account but want to branch out. Perhaps you feel your growth is limited by the Twitter policies regarding following. You would be happy to integrate another social networking site if you could do so easily.

A nice, easy choice would be to open a Friend Feed account. A lot of Twitterers also have FriendFeed accounts. There are good reasons for this. You can easily set up FriendFeed to update when you post to Twitter (and several other services too). Just go to the settings section and follow the direction for connecting to your Twitter account. (Make sure that your posts are coming from Twitter to Friendfeed and not the other way around.)

This is a great way to backup your tweets. If your Twitter account is ever banned or you lost your tweets due to some technical problem, then it would be nice to know that they are backed up on FriendFeed. You can easily build up a following on FriendFeed by following a reasonable number of people and then waiting for some of them to follow you back.

If you use the same profile picture and username, then this can help with your branding. Some people will likely recognize you and follow you on both sites. There is also the advantage of allowing people to find you by searching either site.

I realize that some of us like to do things in a big way and won't be satisfied with just two integrated social profiles. Well, you can definitely add more sites. It just takes a little more effort and patience. A casual user may not want to bother, but a more serious user might consider it an excellent return on their investment of time and energy.

Ping.fm is a great way to do this. Just open a free account and start adding sites. They have a long list of compatible sites. You can click on their links to open accounts at the supported sites and then connect them to your Ping.fm account. (Just don't do something like have FriendFeed connected to both Ping.fm and Twitter. You will get duplicate posts. Some other combinations can lead to nasty feedback loops.)

You can update your sites all at once from Ping.fm. If that works for you, then you have a powerful way of broadcasting your message. It doesn't work for me because I prefer to post to Twitter from either TweetDeck or a tweet scheduling program.

I found a workaround that works for me. I don't connect Twitter and FriendFeed to my Ping.fm account. Instead I allow FriendFeed to feed off my Twitter account and I burn a feed from FriendFeed. (I don't burn a feed from Twitter because I've had problems with my posts appearing correctly.)

FriendFeed has link at the bottom of your profile for the feed. I click on that and then copy the url. I then go to TwitterFeed.com and burn the feed. (Make sure that Post Link is unchecked because that will just add a link to the original post which is unnecessary for short tweets.) I would then connect the feed to Ping.fm (You do this at TwitterFeed.com) so it can update all your other sites. (This will require getting an authorisation code from Ping.fm. (So in review, a tweet to Twitter goes to FriendFeed and then through TwitterFeed.com to Ping.fm where it is broadcast to several other sites.)

This is what worked for me. It might not be the best solution for you, but at least you know what some of the options are. If you come up with an easier solution, I would love to hear about it.

Using Twitter Effectively

This ebook has a lot of helpful hints for Twitter users, especially people who are more than just casual users. I especially enjoyed the section on Twitter Twerminology.

Using Twitter Effectively

Twitter For Beginners

Here is a useful document for beginner Twitter users. It discusses subjects like hashtags, retweets, replies, direct messages, and following. There's no reason to be intimidated. This book can help you to start having fun with Twitter.

Twitter For Beginners
Twitter for Beginners >

Retweeting Tips

A retweet involves reposting a tweet (on Twitter or some other social networking sites)that was authored by someone else. It uses the form RT @username. This lets your readers know where it came from.

Retweeting is a great way to give credit to users who post a lot of great content and is a way to share their great information with your readers. Some tweets can go viral and spread to many thousands of readers.

It's best to use discretion when retweeting and only retweet items that are really worthwhile. It's also good to actually check any links to make sure they are appropriate and actually working before retweeting.

If you have a post that you would like to see retweeted, it's a good idea to keep it shorter than the 140 allowed characters to allow room for you to receive the RT credit.

Welcome to My Social Media Blog!

I love social media. I enjoy spending time on sites like Twitter, Facebook and Friend Feed. I also make some money from these sites and use them to promote my businesses and website. I wanted to start a blog where I can share some of my discoveries.

I plan on posting articles, videos and links that I think will be helpful. I always welcome and appreciate comments. You can also subscribe to my feed or follow me on Twitter.

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