Tools for Twitter

Twitter is one of the top social media platforms. Like any social media space, however,it can easily take up a lot of time. If you’re not ready for social media management, check out some tools that can help.

Twitter management tools:

• Twuffer is a simple tool for scheduling tweets so that, as Twuffer points out, you can appear never to sleep. Or you can schedule all your announcements out on the calendar so you don’t forget.
• Hoot Suite is a social media dashboard that lets you do far more than just schedule your tweets. You can use it with a team, delegating social media tasks to various team members, you can monitor tweets about your company or other topics, create reports on your social media activity, and do it all from your iPhone or iPad. There’s a free version that does a couple of these things, but it mostly just taunts you with all the things you could do if you had the paid version. For a single Twitter account, it’s probably overkill.
• Tweetdeck is a simple interface that’s great for mobile devices and lets you manage everything from one spot. It doesn’t have as many features as the paid version of Hoot Suite but it lets the busy tweeter keep up with multiple social media sites with minimal fuss.
• Sprout Social is the one we use. It’s a powerful suite of tools with excellent analytics. Again, probably overkill for many users, but read our review.

The following tools aren’t dashboards, but they are useful tools for extending Twitter’s value:

• Twitterfeed sends your RSS feed to Twitter. It’s an easy way to push your blog to Twitter (other social media sites, too).
• Commun.it helpss you identify influencers and engaged followers, to help you build your Twitter community.
• Audiense is a download that lets you analyze your Twitter network. You can see how many of your followers are active, where they come from, and a bunch more stuff.

When choosing among Twitter tools, you naturally want to to consider cost and compatibility with your hardware. You should also make sure that you get all the functions you’ll actually use, but not more than you need — these tools are supposed to simplify your life, not make things more complicated.