The Twitter Must-Haves

By now we all recognize the amazing power and growth of the next social bug: Twitter. Twitter has proven to be a versitle and robust ‘buzz’ tool within a variety of business circles. Even so, what many people have yet to discover is the power of the varying third party tools you can use in conjunction with Twitter. I call them the “Must-Haves”.

When using Twitter as a business tool you will realize that although Twitter is a great tool for building buzz, educating consumers and business partners and creating dialog for interaction, its back-to-basics nature sometimes limits how much you can really accomplish.

This is where the Twitter tools come in – they make up for what Twitter lacks. And maybe the best part about these tools is that they are not incorporated with the original twitter site. The user can pick and choose what he or she needs to suit the needs of the organization. Keep the good stuff, leave the dumb fluff.

That being said, here are ten of our favorite tools:

1.) twAitter – Allows you to schedule tweets in advance. Also gives you advanced control over behavior of future tweets including repetition, start and end dates, frequency and a variety of other options. This tool allow the pre-scheduling of tweets.

2.) Twitter local – Allows a user to follow others within a designated geographical area.

3.) WeFollow – Allows a user to search others based on keywords.

4.) twitturly – track what URLs people are talking about as they are posted on Twitter.

5.) Snitter – Tool for managing twitter accounts

6.) HootSuite – Manage multiple accounts with one login. This tool is useful for organizations that manage multiple accounts ie: marketing agencies or parent companies that operating various brands.

7.) TweetStats – a hub for Twitter trends and analysis. Analyze your tweets and those of any username by hour, month, and timeline to determine a pattern of activity. Reply statistics and topic clouds also paint a picture of influence and key themes that portray interests.

8.) TwitterFriends – analytical tool for identifying relevant conversationalists, revealing conversation patterns, and visualizing material conversation networks, by Twitter ID.

9.) GroupTweet – allows workgroups, extended networks, communities, and anyone who wants to broadcast and share private tweets to a specific group.

10.) Diingo – Diingo’s “Twitter-this” feature, you can easily share interesting websites or content on Twitter with a shortened URL – from the page you’re visiting. It also allows you to easily add highlights and sticky notes to any webpage, and then share the annotated page with your Twitter followers.

Together these, and the many other twitter tools available, can help make twitter into an organization’s prime social media resource in today’s ever-advancing marketing world.

So, do you have a favorite twitter tool that helps ‘boost your buzz’?
Let us know.. .

thanks!