Twitter: Tools You Should be Using
Posted 20/07/2010 - 16:12 by admin_igbaffiliate
Twitter is a no-brainer for any business who is trying to step up their game on the Internet. Twitter currently has more than 100 million users worldwide and about 65 million tweets are posted each day, equaling about 750 tweets sent each second according to Twitter. However, Twitter's usage can spike during prominent events. During the 2010 FIFA World Cup fans wrote a record 2,940 tweets per second in the 30 seconds after Japan scored against Cameroon on 14 June, 2010. However in a world of mass 'tweets' what tools can you use to make the most out of this wealth of information?
First things first; if you have an RSS feed, you can instantly be connected to anyone on Twitter that chooses to follow you. Using TwitterFeed to automatically stream your RSS feed into Twitter, which posts your article name followed by a tinyurl link to your article is the first step to success. Twitter has announced its '@anywhere' platform for websites, which allows your site visitors to Tweet and follow you directly from your website. This app platform integrates Twitter into websites, so you can follow and tweet without having to go to Twitter itself.
However, if you want to be more hands-on below are some specific tactics to get the most out of twitter directly:
Find Out About Who You’re Following:
Here are some tools to help you investigate your followers and make an informed decision about whether to keep following them.
1. Twitter Grader – Using a detailed 5 piece algorithm, Twitter Grader assigns every user you run through its system a grade from 1-100. Using this tool you can investigate how engaged the people you’re following are and that can help you decide if you want to keep following them.
2. Twinfluence – Twinfluence is a scientific approach to measuring the influence of Twitter users. It’s another set of metrics you can use to help you figure out who you want to follow.
3. Tweetcloud – One of the most important factors when deciding whether you want to follow a Twitter user is what sort of content they tweet about. If someone tweets mostly about topics you don’t care about, they might not be the best person for you to follow. Tweetcloud creates a tag cloud of a person’s tweets to give you a bird’s eye view of the type of things they tweet about.
Find Your Friends:
Not all relationships on Twitter are equal. Unlike many social networks, Twitter allows you to follow (most) people without their permission. There might be a bunch of people who are following you that you aren’t following back, and likewise there are probably some people you’re following who aren’t reciprocating. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — if their content is good, then you shouldn’t worry about whether they follow you back. But knowing who your friends are is helpful when you’re trying to organize your Twitter follows.
4. Twitter Karma – Twitter Karma is a great app that lets you sort through all of your follows and see who’s not following you in return, who you have a mutual follow/follow-back relationship with, and who is following you that you’re not following back.
5. Friend or Follow – Friend or Follow does essentially the same thing as Twitter Karma, helping you figure out who your friends, follows, and fans are on Twitter. The difference is in the presentation, and it might be a little easier to use for those with a large number of follows or followers.
6. Qwitter – Once you’ve done your initial cleaning, Qwitter is a nice app that will update you via email whenever someone stops following you. It will even let you know what you tweeted that caused them to stop following you, which could be useful.
Get Rid of Inactives:
According to a recent study, 80% of Twitter users have less than 10 total tweets. That might not be a bad thing — some people might join Twitter specifically to follow others and track their updates. But inactive users might also not be the best people for you to follow. Here are two tools that can help you weed out the inactives.
7. Nest.Unclutterer – Nest.Unclutterer will automatically block Twitter users who are following more than a certain number of people or who have been inactive for a certain number of days. You can specify those thresholds and white list certain followers so that they are exempt from the cleaning. Nest.Unclutterer is actually less about who you’re following, and more about making sure people following you are actually friends you want to be associated with.
8. Twitoria – Twitoria scans through your Twitter account and finds anyone who has been inactive for the past week, two weeks, month, two months, six months, or year.
Manage It All:
Having cleaned your Twitter follow list using the tools just mentioned, you should keep on top of things from here on out. Here are two apps that will help you better manage new follows and followers.
9. TweetSum – TweetSum digests all your new followers, rates them using what they call the DBI (“Douche Bag Index”), a number that supposedly weeds out Twitter users likely to be annoying, and then lets you easily follow them back or categorize them as tweeps you don’t want to follow. You can see a list of recent tweets for each new follower as well, which is helpful.
10. Tweepler – Tweepler is a new follower management application that lets you make quick, one click decisions about whether to follow people back or drop them into an ignore pile (out of sight, out of mind). In addition to being able to view recent tweets, Tweepler gives helpful stats about new followers, such as average tweets per day.
11. Hootsuite - Previously called BrightKit, this application allows Twitter to be used by a team of people, by allowing different profiles to be connected to one master account. This way, you can select a number of accounts to tweet from without logging in to each, while the boss can choose who has permission to use the master account. It has offers analytic functions, which can allow the Twitter account manager to measure the businesses’ influence by counting the number of clicks per day on each of your Twitter accounts. This also tracks the locations of users, as well as the referring websites.
Twitter Search and Monitoring Tools:
Twitter users produce huge amounts of data you impossibly can be digest or overview as a human being. Even your followers tweets are too much in most cases. Search and monitoring tools make sure that you don’t miss something important.
12. Topsy - Finds and sorts most of your brand’s mentions, tweets and links
13. Yahoo Sideline - An Adobe Air based desktop search tool for Twitter. It also displays current trends
14. Twilert – Like Google Alerts for Twitter mentions, catches most of them
15. TweetBeep – Similar to Twilert but less reliable. Good to find additional mentions Twilert overlooks but not enough on it’s own
16. Radian6 – This is an advanced social media analytics suite with some Twitter tools also useful for CRM
17. Twitturly – shows the most popular Twitter links in a social news like interface
18. Tweetreach – Find out who really is your friend, or at least who spread your message the most
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