6 Tools That Make Twitter Easier to Use
Twitter can be a powerful marketing tool, but sometimes the steady stream of tweets can be overwhelming. These tools can help keep you organized and make social media marketing easy for your small business.
Once you have thousands of followers, it can be hard to cut through the chatter on Twitter. Fortunately, there are a number of tools that make searching, organizing and scheduling tweets easier.
HootSuite
There are many desktop and web-based Twitter clients that help organize Tweets, and HootSuite is one of the most popular. It offers free and premium accounts that you can use to organize your Twitter stream based on keywords or user lists. You can also add other social media accounts like Facebook, LinkedIn and Foursquare.
HootSuite lets you shrink URLs, leaving more room for text, as well as schedule tweets for later. You can also send the same message across different Twitter or social media accounts, which is a convenient time-saver.
How Your Business Can Use It: The person in charge of your social media outreach can use HootSuite to set up searches for keywords relating to your company and industry. With columns for each keyword, she can monitor what’s being said about your brand and respond accordingly.
Twitterfeed
If you’ve got one or more blogs, you don’t want to waste time sharing the links for each new post. Instead, useTwitterfeed. With it, you can set up multiple RSS feeds that publish to your Twitter account each time a new blog is posted.
How Your Business Can Use It: Set up your company’s blog with Twitterfeed so that your Twitter followers get your latest posts ASAP.
Mobile Apps
Many Twitter users are on the go, so the many mobile app platforms for Twitter (including HootSuite versions) make it easy to update and check Tweets from virtually anywhere. The apps have functionality that makes viewing them more convenient than simply visiting Twitter’s site from your phone.
How Your Business Can Use It: When attending conferences, you can keep followers updated on key points from speakers by Tweeting from your phone, using the hashtag provided by the conference.
Tweetstats
If you’re interested in analytics, Tweetstats is worth looking into. With it, you input your username to see how many Tweets you’re putting out over a daily, weekly and monthly period. You can also see your TweetCloud, which shows which topics you’re Tweeting about the most, as well as providing a chart of the number of followers and people you follow.
How Your Business Can Use It: Analyze your stats to see what topics people are responding to, then plan more Tweets around these subjects to generate more conversations related to your business.
Sulia
Sulia is great for viewing Twitter users based on topics they Tweet. This organized system can help you find new people to follow by clicking on the category of your choice, then following people who tweet interesting things on Twitter.
How Your Business Can Use It: Search for people in your industry, or in a category that can use your products or services. Follow them and comment on their Tweets to build a relationship.
Twitpic
You can share photos from your computer or mobile device on Twitter with Twitpic. Once you set up an account, you are given a special email address to use. Email a photo to this address with a subject line and it’s automatically Tweeted from your account.
How Your Business Can Use It: Take photos of new products and ask for feedback from followers on Twitter.
More Apps Every Day
The great thing about social media is that there are more and more applications to make it easier to use every day. You can find valuable ways to save time and money, as well as new ways to use Twitter to market to your customers, simply by searching for “Twitter tools” and seeing what’s new in the market.
Find the tools that are truly useful to you as a business owner; you may even find new ways to use these tools that enhance your company’s marketing efforts! Use them as part of your social media marketing strategy, which should include progressively following more people and sharing a mix of questions, conversation starters, links and promotional Tweets.
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