The last few weeks have been jam packed with conferences for me. Everything from Internet2go, BIL, to SMX. At almost all of these I have been talking about twitter. Only a few people I met were not been on twitter.

However, of those on twitter many struggled with how best to fully utilize twitter. I get questions like:

• how do I remain aware of the most important tweets?
• can I search twitter feeds not from my friends?
• anyway I can see what my customers are tweeting about easily and regularly with something more powerful than twitters in-built public search?
• if I twitter a URL I loose people who might otherwise look at the rest of my feeds, anyway I can remain front of mind as the best source for certain kinds of URLs and info?

In answer to all the above I have decided to share my top 3 twitter tools. These are tools I believe all tweeters should use to optimize their tweeting experience. If you are an advanced tweeter these may be tools you know about. But trust me not everyone is at that stage yet, so bear with me. You just might learn something new.

Top Twitter tool #1 Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is a desktop application that greatly increases the functionality of twitter by breaking down different types of tweets into columns. You can set these up as you like. Mine are set up by tweets from friends, direct messages, and tweets on words I am interested in on twitter’s public stream. This organization in Tweetdeck helps me see direct messages and response tweets quickly. The search words I have set up keep me updated about new tweets of items of interest (kinda like google alerts but much faster).

Top Twitter tool #2 Hootsuite This was formerly known as Brightkit. I have no idea why they changed the name. The old name was better not to mention stuck in my head ). Hoostsuite lets you pre-schedule tweets. The pre-scheduling helps if you tweeting at times your followers aren’t on. It also lets you measure how successful your tweets were in driving traffic to URLs.

At the beginning of this year I predicted that there will be a rise in tools that evaluate user social capital. Success in driving traffic to a URL via your tweets is one such tool. For social capital purposed though if would help to see how you compare versus others.The next tool TwitPwr makes a crude attempt at this.

Top Twitter tool #3 TwitPwr TwitPwr allows you to enter a URL and get a short URL for sharing on twitter. Personally I like this tool for the top bar it has when someone clicks on your tweeted URL letting them know which twitter profile sent them there. When @calgreg at twitter used TwitPwr I knew from my browswer that he sent me to that particular URL, making it easier for me to remember to follow him.

TwitPwr however markets their tool as a way to drive traffic through tweets. TwitPwr assigns you a Pwr rating for all the traffic you forward to a URL through the twitter API. Your Pwr rating and twitter profile is then provided on the TwitPwr page, if you are rated high more TwitPwr users follow you. Not sure how successful this will be for users or TwitPwr. Especially since tweet traffic and influence is only valuable when people are tweeting on your topic of interest. TwitPwr currently clusters all Pwr ratings together without info on what topic the URL covers or the twitterer usually covers

Bonus Twitter tool Socialtoo Socialtoo lets you set up automatic follows and follow messages for everyone who follows you. When I started using this I got responses from those who were amazed at fast following as well as those who were annoyed at the bot following.

Those who were amazed wanted to know how I do this. Those who were annoyed, were annoyed because they think this bot takes away the human element from twitter. Personally I like socialtoo as it allows me to focus my energy on tweeting and interacting with those who tweet something of value without constantly going to twitter to follow. I regularly go through my followers and remove individuals who don’t add value later. But by keeping autofollowing open, I make value decision based on exceptions rather than with each new follower.

There you have it folks. Someone else recommended twine to me this morning. Checking it out as we speak. Are there any other twitter tools that you absolutely adore?

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