7 Tools I use for Twitter
As many of you are starting to work out, Twitter is very big for me, I still the potential and I see many of the pitfalls and the eternal debate to gather lots of followers or focus and maintain quality go from one site to the other.
But these are the current set of tools I am using on a weekly or daily bases:
- Twittergrader.com and Klout.com
Plug in a twitter name and you’ll get an account summary, a ranking and a grade. It is a great way to track your twitter accounts influence or check up on others. Klout is definitely the more informative (my score is about 36), whereas Twittergrader is kinder (my score 94/100). - Twitter Counter and Twitter Stats
I’ve used Twitter Counter for a while and they send me a weekly report, it not too deep, but useful to know. However, I was recently impressed by the level of Stats from Twitter Stats. Easy to read graphs give you a real sense of your progress and interaction with others.What’s often surprising is the lack of inaction – we said over and over again half the story is in publishing content, but actual communicating with clients or potential clients is more important or at least where the ROI should be happening.
- Tweetreach
Search for a @user, #hashtag, topic, keyword, URL, anything really and then see how far that keyword has penetrated into Twitter. A quick search for your @username and you’ll see the number and type of audience you might be reaching.In truth the real use for this tool is to measure a specific campaign you may have run, pick something you’re hoping your audience should have picked up on (it might be a URL), search for it and see how far it really got. Be prepared to be disappointed.
- Twitter Feed or Feedburner
I’ve always used Feedburner, there is a Socialize function that allows me to add a Twitter account and then that send out my Tweets every time I Blog. Actually, this goes a step further because I can add any RSS feed to Feedburner, and then have those results posted to Twitter.Example: If you’re following an industry Blog, or super relevant website, just hook in the content to go directly to your Twitter Account. Everything is automatic and hopefully relevant to your audience.
Twitter Feed does the same thing, it connects to a Twitter, Facebook and a couple of other services. Add your RSS feed and that’s it. A great way to automatically feed your, or someone else’s, RSS feed to your twitter account and have it automatically send out tweets. You can set it up so it will tweet once per each new blog post or multiple times a day.
- SocialOomph
SocialOomph does a lot of things. It’s good for three things, a) setting up an automatic follow to anyone who follows you and then SocialOomph sends the new follow a customised message, b) setting up so that it monitors Twitter and sends me an e-mail whenever anyone mentions me in a Tweet and c) setting up keyword tracking, if Tweets contain your keywords you’ll get an email explaining who Tweets what. It’s a good tool for exploring potential new customers. - ManageFilter
Every now and again you need to clean out your account and lose some of the fat, there is commercially speaking not a lot of point in following people that do not follow you back. Fine if they provide specific information or resource, but not so good if you were trying to encourage them to follow you. So clean them out and improve your ‘influence’ and ‘quality’ at the same time.I’ve tried Just Unfollow and Refollow – there’re ok, but the winner is ManageFlitter. Zip in, Clean out some of the people not following you back and you’re on your way again. You can also clean out people that never Tweet, or that don’t have logos, or are essentially spam.
- HootSuite
I know you can use Tweetdeak, Ping.fm and a million other services to write your Tweets and I was very sad when Hootsuite started charging for some of their services, but I still keep going back to them. They provide the best interface allow scheduling of Tweets and have the widest integration with other Facebooks, LinkedIn and so on. It really is a one stop shop for Social Media Management and to bad you can’t track your results.For smaller account Hootsuite still works best, but I would not recommend buying into them, it just not worth it, there are others cheaper better for that.
Okay – final comments – I’m not a total cheapskate and when the need merits you may need to start upgrading for all these free tools, but it is a matter of researching the right tool for the right job. If you need any advice, or want to know more please give me a call or contact me on Facebook below. The other day I was actually criticised for constantly providing clients with a ‘get-out-free’ clause, i.e. explaining to clients that there is a way for them not to pay.
Let it be known – I’m very happy to take on clients Social Media needs and I can and do set up and employ all of the above tools for me clients.