3 Twitter Tools I Love and Why

When I first started using Twitter it was fun, exciting and manageable. But with 100’s of tweets coming in, it quickly turned into a challenge. I came across 3 Twitter tools which allow me to control the chaos: Tweetdeck, Hootsuite, and Tweetlater.

Tweetdeck, is my dashboard. I like how I can have a nice column listing of all of my twitter accounts (I have two: www.twitter.com/IAPAM for my social media marketing and IAPAM aesthetic medicine industry news, and www.twitter.com/JefftheFoodie for my foodie exploits). When you follow many people, it gets hard to manage all the inbound tweets, and I love the ability segment the tweets by creating “Groups” of the people I’m following. I use the IAPAM account to follow both social media marketing and aesthetic/medspa industry tweets. So I’ve created two groups, one for each. This way I can quickly glance and see what is happening in each group. I can also create a column where I can see where I’ve been mentioned and another one with a listing of my DM’s. I also Tweet from Tweetdeck, which also a nice built-in url shortener. For those of you with an iPhone its also iPhone compatible.

I use Hootsuite to schedule my tweets. As part of my workflow, I will spend an hour doing research and instead of sending 5 tweets within an hour, I can schedule them to be sent out whenever I choose with Hootsuite. Another cool feature is the Hootlet app, which allows me to quickly tweet a website that I come across that I may think is of interest. Hootsuite also gives you the ability to link your RSS feeds from your blogs to be automatically sent via Twitter. This helps reduce the amount of work you need to do, by automatically tweeting your blog entries (at set time intervals). FYI- This blog entry was sent to Twitter via Hootsuite.

Tweetlater also has the ability to schedule tweets, but I like the Hootsuite interface better. Tweetlater is very confusing. I do use Tweetlater though to create automatic replies for those who are following me.

I also signed up on Twellow.com and Wefollow.com, which are great places to find followers. I’ve also found search.twitter.com to be very valuable when searching for people I know (but don’t know their Twitter name).

The nice thing is everything I’ve mentioned is Free (for now). I hope these tools help you better manage your Twitter experience!

Cheers, Jeff Russell