3 Useful, Recently Discovered Twitter Tools

What a wonderful Twitter world it is!

It is a privilege to now manage Twitter accounts for three different business-to-business clients (one under the auspices of Markit Strategies & PR), as well as my own Twitter presence. 

As previous posts have described, I’ve found Twitter to be a powerful social media tool for businesses to engage, connect and relate to relevant communities.

Each Twitter program I manage has its own goal – but at the most fundamental, in each client’s case, Twitter serves as a “micro-blog” tool to do the following:

• Connect with relevant communities
• Follow other like-minded organizations or individuals
• Actively engage, listen within those communities
• Share information in ways that the client itself might not through its website or other more traditional channels

There’s An App for That

As the graphic to the left shows, there are numerous third-party application tools that help make Twitter more productive.

The graphic organizes the tools by their function such as applications that help with collaboration, measurement, content development and so on.

Three out of a Million

Incredibly, in the last few months, the amount of Twitter third party applications has reached over one million!  

These applications help with reporting, following, content scheduling and much more.

A New App Every 1.5 Seconds

According to a post on the topic, "Application developers play a fundamental role in helping people get the best out of Twitter," the blog post said. "A new app is registered every 1.5 seconds, fueling a spike in ecosystem growth in the areas of analytics, duration and publisher tools."

That means in the time it is taking me to write this blog, hundreds of new apps will be developed!

Three out of a Million

So before too many more Twitter productivity apps are invented, here are my current favorites, recently discovered applications:

1) TweetReach  

How far did your tweet travel?  This free, easy tool lets you search for a URL, Twitter name, phrase or hashtag. TweetReach analyzes tweets that match your search. Easy to read reports display the reach and exposure data for those tweets.  As an example, in one week, 31 Tweets including the handle of one of the accounts I managed reached over 20,000 people.

2) TwitCleaner  

No matter the size of an account's followers, every once in awhile, it’s good to clean one’s Twitter feed! TwitCleaner is free. It scans Twitter followers and lumps them into groups, suggesting the folks one might want to stop following.  The categories are interesting – for instance, see the “snobs” who hardly follow anyone back.  See other folks who don’t ever Tweet or interact with anyone else.  There’s even a group flagged as “Self Obsessed (talks about themselves 50% of the time) and others who post nothing but links. By seeing these “undesirables” one can cull followers for a more fruitful Tweet experience.

3) TwitSprout  

Previous B2B Blog posts address tools that measure Twitter ROI and impact.  (Yes, I’m addicted to measurement applications!)   And here’s another one! TwitSprout (love the name) is a free tool now in Beta, delivering custom branded dashboards depicting historical growth, change in followers, influence indicators and other key usage metrics. Reports are free and useful for social media team members to measure actual Twitter engagement.   

Have you discovered favorite Twitter tools lately?  Share them here!