Five Tools & Apps To Optimize Your Twitter Experience
Twitter is a great tool to engage and communicate with customers and like-minded people. With the right tools and apps in place, twitter can have a favorable impact on both your business and personal life. I have been using twitter for both business and personal use since early 2009 and in this article will share some of the tips and programs that I use to optimise my experience.
Twitter Tools & Apps
So rule #1 decide if you are going to use twitter as a business tool or for personal use, the mixture does not work. The strategy of twitter is to gain followers, the advantage of the follower is the fact you can direct message them. In early 2009 I built a personal account and used it to target Credit Unions. Credit Unions, usually forward thinking and early adopters in technology, started following me right and left as I retweeted many articles relevant to their industry. The person usually in charge of the Twitter account was the marketing director, and this was an ideal channel of communication for me.
One of the tools that changed my perception of Twitter was Tweetdeck, it truly defined the description of Twitter being a firehouse of information. Tweetdeck enables you to type in a search query and yields all the tweets that involve a keyword or phrase, so now I could build a list of like-minded tweeters and follow them to gain and share information.
The first tool that I would recommend is WeFollow, what it does is asks you five categories that you are involved in and pushes a tweet out with your vanity wefollow name to let people know what your interests. We follow is a great way for building lists of like-minded people based on interests, geographic and top tags.
Many articles and retweets go over the allocated 140 characters, you must have a good catchy url shortner. I choose Bitly because it provides track backs and also analytics for a couple other tools I will mention later. Why analytics, if your retweets aren’t getting read, then you’re not retweeting or posting the right type content. Analytics allow you to narrow down what people are and are not interested in.
A recent app that is growing rapidly is Buffer. What it does is allows you to build a que of articles or content that you want to share, and disperse it over set thresholds of time. I try to only retweet or share supporting articles or content that is supportive of my blog and this app allows me to push that content over set thresholds instead of sharing clumps of data.
This app introduced me to SocialBro which is an app that allows you to determine the best times to tweet and reduce bloat and spam followers. The program also generates a tag cloud which features keywords that are based on the interests and tweets of your followers and friends. It allows you to delete non follow backs and inactive users rapidly. This app really has improved my overall twitter experience by letting allowing me to fine tune who I am following and eliminate spammers.
The last tool that I have been using as of recently is mirror.me This app generates a reflection in the form of a tag cloud based off of your tweets and the tweets of your followers. This tag cloud is massive, with around 50 words and gives you the option of clicking on any word to see like-minded people or businesses and fine tune your followings. A great tool that once again fine tunes your Twitter experience.
All in all Twitter is one of the best online communication channels. When used the correct way it is one of the most powerful tools to learn something about anything in a matter of minutes. All businesses in my opinion should have twitter as their primary way to communicate with their clients. The tools and apps shared in this article will help you to optimize both your personal and business experience.. +jrh
What Twitter Tools & Apps Have You Used Over The Years?? What Has Been Successful and What Hasn’t Worked?? Please Answer In The Comments Section, thx!!
