The last few years have seen an amazing advance in social media applications for use on the web and mobile phones, making it easier than ever to quickly communicate thoughts, news, stories, feelings, and so much more. Feeding our need of constantly updated information is Twitter, used every day by some 175 million users generating 65 million tweets a day.
At LyntonWeb, we utilize Twitter as a social media platform for our clients and ourselves to distribute news and information, specials, keep track of trends, update followers, and provide re-tweets and links to relevant information. Our goal is to use this very unique social media application to provide our clients with a way to quickly provide their customers with the information they seek. As a relatively simple platform, Twitter has spawned a race for hundreds of companies to develop supreme Twitter applications to better manage Tweets, mentions, responses, and research. Listed below are some of the essential tools that we use constantly to streamline the Twitter experience for our clients:
TweetDeck
The all-encompassing Twitter management platform, TweetDeck lets you view and manage your Tweets, responses, and re-tweets all in a single panel with a slick graphic interface. Other social media applications such as Facebook and LinkedIn have also worked their way into the TweetDeck interface, allowing for a one-stop shop to update and monitor the majority of your or your company’s social media world.
HootSuite
Another very popular social media account management system is HootSuite. HootSuite allows you to manage multiple Twitter profiles and (what I like) uses a tabbed system to quickly switch between Twitter profiles. You can also schedule your tweet, use the same tweet for multiple profiles, track tweet statistics, and allow for multiple editors. HootSuite is quickly gaining popularity amongst major corporations and organizations as a way of managing the massive amounts of news and information that can follow a particular industry.
Echofon for Firefox
If you're like me, you're typically buried in Firefox all day, which sometimes means I'm not checking or updating tweets as often as I should. Echofon is an excellent Firefox extension that plugs right into the bottom right corner of Firefox and allows you to see how many new tweets you have from the people you're following, what they're saying, and it even allows you to update, reply, and re-tweet, all from this extension. Echofon also conveniently offers extensions for iPad, iPhone, Mac, and Facebook.
Bit.ly
With Twitter, text characters are considered gold. With a limit of 140 characters per update, sharing long, drawn-out links with no embedding can sometimes take up the majority of space used to comment about the link you're providing. Bit.ly is an excellent URL shortener - simply plug in your long link, and Bit.ly spits back a shorter, much more manageable link for you to use in your updates.
Twitoria
Sometimes having too many friends is a problem. Twitoria helps you find the users that follow you that really aren't doing much of anything else. Twitoria informs you of how long ago and how often your followers have tweeted, so if you think your followers aren't reading what you have to say and otherwise cluttering your Twitter lifestyle, you can give them the boot.
TweetStats
Are you an aggressive tweeter who wants to know how often you tweet, who you most often re-tweet, comment on, etc.? TweetStats give you a nice graphic interface to keep track of these statistics and many more.
These are only some of the tools that we use day-to-day at LyntonWeb to help our clients reach out to their customers. If you have additional questions about exploring social media opportunities, check out our services page, or feel free to contact us. Best of luck out there in the Twitterverse!