Sunday, February 6, 2011

A Second Look: 6 Types of Twitter Tools That Come in Handy

We go over so many tools here are Blogging Tips that many of them are often forgotten as they’re buried deeper into the archives.

Twitter ToolBox image via Mastermind Blogger.

I thought it would be nice to go over a few Twitter tools that are useful and definitely worth a second look. If you’re an avid Twitter user, it’s a good idea to use a tool from each of these categories to help with productivity, build your brand and get the most out of Twitter. Since this list only includes past posts from Blogging Tips, it will not address any new tools (which I’m sure there are many of) that may exist in each category; so feel free to add those additional tools in the comments!

Schedule Your Tweets

If you don’t have much time to spend on Twitter yet still want to appear active, 3 of the tools listed on 5 Ways to Schedule Your Tweets (2 are no longer available) can help you schedule future tweets. Scheduling tweets is also great for promoting a product or service. You can schedule 1-2 tweets per day for a certain amount of time, but just be sure to change up the wording as much as possible for each tweets. Twitvance is also a great tool for scheduling unlimited tweets.

Clean Out Your Followers

If you are following over 200 or even 100 people on Twitter, it’s just impossible to manually clean out your followers (ie. inactive users, spammers, etc). You’d have to go to the page of each user and then look at their tweets to see when the last one was posted and then check out what type of content their posting. No one has time for that! Luckily, there are lots of tools out there to help you clean out your followers. None of the tools listed on 4 Twitter Account Cleaners are still around, but the tools listed on Four More Twitter Account Cleaners along with Refollow are sure to come in handy.

Sift Through The Junk

Let’s face it, the amount of spam and shameless promotion on Twitter is getting out of hand. There is so much that it is often hard to find anything useful in your Twitter stream. After using one of the Twitter cleaners above it shouldn’t be so much of a problem, but just in case here are a few tools to help you filter through the junk and find the tweets that matter: Cascaad, TidyTweet and Filttr.

Shorten Your URLs

Most Twitter tools come with an integrated URL shortener, but surprisingly Twitter.com does not have that feature (yet). So if you are in need of a short URL or want to tool to help you condense URLs while browsing check out 9 Short URL Services and 8 URL Shorteners for Quickly Sharing Links.

Keep Up via Alerts

If you’re an extremely busy person, keeping up with Twitter can be impossible and hiring help is just out of the question for most. Having to login each day and look through thousands of tweets can be a pain and many users just give up from frustration. If you’re looking for a more convenient way to keep up with Twitter, then opting to receive alerts is a good idea. With TwitterAlerts you can receive notifications by SMS, email or IM for an unlimited number of keywords. If you want to keep up with specific users instead, I find that IFTTT handles that job quite well.

Backup Your Tweets

Lastly, you want to be sure that you are backing up your tweets on a regular basis. There is nothing worse than building up a Twitter account for a year or two and then losing it all (trust me, I know). Plus, there’s always something weird going on at Twitter and users often complain about missing tweets. You can save yourself the hassle by using one of these 10 Twitter Backup Tools for Preserving Tweets (plus 8 bonus options at the end). You know what they say, it’s better to be safe than sorry; make sure you’re safe!

(image source)

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