With the sudden surge in popularity of Twitter, everyone seems to have a Twitter account. Go through your RSS feeds and the blogs you read – chances are, your favorite online writers also have Twitter accounts. The cool thing about following writers you already read is that they’ll refer you to new content sources on the topics you enjoy, since these writers will often link to articles and blogs that interest them.
There are plenty of people who try to immediately jump on the Twitter bandwagon and follow thousands of people. Don’t be one of them. To experience the power of the service, you need to learn how to use it organically – not by just jumping in and befriending 10,000 people. People who jump into power-using Twitter often don’t understand the subtle rules of Twitter because they haven’t used it enough.
Twitter is a simple service that lets you follow anyone. Twitter is just a place where you can send short messages to other people. Deeper down, Twitter is a place where you can market your company, share information, and get advice quickly and easily. Twitter is a way to connect with other people.
Twitter can be used for tons of purposes such as connecting with friends, marketing your company, and responding to customer service requests. These Twitter tools will allow you a seamless integration of Twitter in your daily routine. Most of these tools have been around for years so they have a sound business model. Without tools, Twitter can be overwhelming and difficult to fathom. There are numerous tools that allow you to sift through this massive resource of latest news, links and gossip.
Desktop and Web-Based Twitter Clients
TweetDeck
Sleek Adobe Air desktop client for Twitter offering a good overview with several panes.
Seesmic
Seesmic is like both CoTweet and Tweetdeck; they have a web-based client and an Adobe Air based app with similar features. They even support Facebook and other services as well.
twhirl
One of the more popular Twitter clients from the early days of Twitter. I can still recommend it.
Spaz
Cross platform open source Twitter client for Mac, Windows and Linux.
Miscellaneous Online Twitter Tools
ManageFlitter
An advanced Twitter contact management tool I can highly recommend.
Twellow
Twellow is the “Yellow Pages” of Twitter.
iTweet
This is an alternative web-based interface for Twitter, and indeed it’s a little more usable than the default one on Twitter.com.
Paper.li
Ever wanted to publish a newspaper? Paper.li does it on your behalf. Just pick the sources, be it people or hashtags.
Twitter WordPress Plugins
Twitter Tools by Alex King
I use this set of tools over on my own SEO blog and it works fine, you can even tweet from the WordPress backend and your blog address will be used as the client (software) link.
WP to Twitter
Twitter updater plugin using the SEO friendly Cli.gs short URL service for tweeting your posts.
Twitter Tools
Twitter Tools is a plugin that creates a complete integration between your WordPress blog and your Twitter account.
Reliable Twitter
This WordPress plugin uses the Google Ajax API to get a reliable stream of tweets to your blog sidebar.
Firefox Extensions for Twitter
Echofon
Simple but effective and popular Twitter Firefox add-on. I have used Echofox as my main Twitter client for several years now.
HootBar
Lets you post to Twitter right from the address bar of your browser.
TwitBin
Even simpler Twitter add on for Firefox.
Twitter Social News
Topsy
Search the most popular current stories shared on Twitter. Also available this week, month or all time search.
Trunk.ly
This is a Delicious-like social bookmarking site for Twitter but it’s automated. It collects the links you share on Twitter, Facebook, Delicious and everywhere, saving them as bookmarks with tags. You can share them with others as well.
TweetMeme
Find out the most popular stories as shared via the Tweetmeme button.
Twitturly
Social news-like interface for the current hot tweets.
MicroBlogBuzz
Shows you what’s most popular today, this week etc. on Twitter and across the other common microblogging platforms.
Twitter Analytics
TwitterCounter
This is a Twitter followers counter similar to the Feedburner count for blog subscribers.
Klout
Klout is probably the most widely used tool to determine a person’s (or account’s) authority on Twitter. The sheer number of followers is a worthless metric.
TweetReach
Tweetreach is an analytics tool that estimates the number of impressions you have received, even listing the users who provided them. It’s quite biased though, as impressions by large numbers of bot followers do not mean much. So make sure you weed out the automated accounts when considering the numbers.
TweetStats
This statistic tool measures everything from when you tweet (weekdays, time of day) to who your real friends are by counting how often you address people.
FriendOrFollow.com
This tool compares your list of friends with your followers and shows you who does not follow you back.
I’ve been using Echofon and Klout ever since. I’ll try to download the other apps and give them a try. Thanks for sharing!
Twuffer is a great Tweet scheduler, it is only in beta but it is free and you are not limited by scheduled tweets.
Thank you for sharing this information! Really good summary of Twitter tools!
Thomas
What a comprehensive summary and a great resource – a definite share!
Tweepi is also another good program that helps to determine who is following and not following you.
thanks for the list!… make my work more easier :)