Tips and Tutorials

I decided to create a separate post so that we can keep adding to this list.

One thing I am big on when I  Consultant with a  Business Owners is maximizing their time and doing things smart. So when I recommend this communication tool to a business owner I want to give them the tools they need to be successful at it.  I don’t want to see a business owner struggle to figure this out and spend countless hours.  So here are some of the tools to put in your Business Twitter tool box so that you can focus on your business and not spend time finding the best tools to do so.

Warning there are many out there and these are just a few.  My professional Business Consulting advice is to pick the ones that work for you and your business.  Some tools may work for others but you have to find the ones that work for you.

If you also own a product or a service, here are some essential tools to help you harness the full power of Twitter without making any dent in your existing marketing budget because these tools are completely free:

• TweetLater: This powerful service allows you to schedule tweets (much like you would schedule emails). Say if you are announcing a new product at 10 AM EST tomorrow, write a message through TweetLater and it will automatically get published to your Twitter status exactly at the time you want. You need not be texting at the time of actual launch.Another very powerful feature is the ability to receive email digests of keyword activity in the Tweetosphere. This allows you to join a conversation or track topics and trends.
• Twitter for Facebook: If you are on Facebook, this application forwards your Twitter updates directly to Facebook as status updates.
• Twitter Feed – This service fetches new content from your blog (or any site that supports RSS feeds ) and publishes a link in your twitter account. It will help your existing customers stay updated about news related to products they already own.
• Tweet Scan - This is like Google for Twitter. It will solve two problems:a) Tweet Scan is great for monitoring feedback about your product from conversations happening in the Twitter universe. And they provide RSS feeds so you’ll automatically know when people tweet about products.b) With Tweet Scan, you can find existing customers who are already on Twitter and follow them so they come to know about your existence. Or you may search for the name of your competing products and track potential customers.
• Twitter PollDaddy - This service lets you use Twitter for getting opinions or for asking questions through polls. Type your question with a list of potential answers and post it to your Twitter account.So if you are nearing a product release and only one of the two features can make it to the final product, use Twitter PollDaddy service to learn from customers which of the two features they think is more important to them.
• Quotably - This is another quintessential twitter service that makes it easy for you to follow conversations happening around your tweets. It arranges replies to all your tweets in a threaded form much like the way you see discussions on usenet groups.
• TwitterReply - With Twitter, your customers get an alternate way to get in touch with you through public tweets or even direct messages. They may want to know the contact number of your support team or they could be looking for a manual which can they can’t locate on your website.TwitterReply sends you an instant email whenever there’s a new tweet for you in the Twitter universe. You need it because customers contacting you through Twitter may be looking for instant answers.
• We Follow ( http://wefollow.com/ )
  A user powered Twitter directory. Add yourself to categories that are relevant to your social media persona.
• FriendFeed http://www.friendfeed.com
  FriendFeed is a web service that allows you to add all your updates from social media websites, social networks, blogs and social bookmarking and micro-blogging services into one place, along with the more common feed types like RSS and Atom.FriendFeed also allows you to subscribe to the streams of other people, such as family members, friends and work colleagues. Currently, there’s support for fifty nine different feed source.  This is a HUGE time saving tool so that you can manage all sites that you are signed up for.
• Twitangle
  Manage your friends and followers with tags ( http://www.twittangle.com/ )
  This tool lets you rate and tag your friends and filter them on a timeline! You can also create custom groups of your followers and filter you timeline by that group.
• Twitalyzer ( http://www.twitalyzer.com/twitalyzer/index.asp )
  Evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.
• ReTweet Rank ( http://www.retweetrank.com/ )
  Find out how popular your tweets are.
• Mr. Tweeep ( http://mrtweet.net/ )
  Find relevant and interesting Twitter users to follow.
• Twitscoop ( http://www.twitscoop.com/snapshot/2008/12/9/2245.html )
  Stay on top of twitter’s hot topics or discussions in real time.
• Untweeps ( http://untweeps.mobeezy.mobi )
  Unfollow people who have not updated within “X” amount of days
  Find out the tweeps out of your followers who have not updated within a specified number of days (you can decide how many days is it) and lets you unfollow them
• Twitalert ( http://www.twilert.com/ )
  Receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service, well any keyword you like really.
• Ping.fm ( http://splitweet.com/ )
  Update over 30 social networking sites at once (including: linkedin, facebook, Twitter).
• SEOtrack ( http://seotrackonline.com/ )
  Maximize your social media traffic & optimize your website, blog etc for search & social media ? Audit your website’s architecture with this free site tool: http://seotrackonline.com/
  

At  TwitterHandbook.com you can find a comprehensive list of many more tools and apps for Twitter.
The post on apps comes from Chapter 10 of the book Twitter Revolution

Twitter Fan Wiki has acomprehesive  page dedicated to apps and are categoried to easily find.