20 Twitter Tools to Boost Your Business

Are you looking for building your brand/business on Twitter? Are you spending more than the time required to boost your business on Twitter? Here are 20 Twitter Tools to boost your business.

Twitter has been woven into many marketing plans. 36% of marketers have found a customer through twitter. You can do a lot with 140 characters include videos and pictures as well.

Information on twitter is real-time which as a business helps you stay connected easily and monitor as well. People also turn to Twitter to talk about your business and industry. This gives you powerful context to connect directly with present and future customers in real time. But here comes the challenge “How to best use Twitter” to identify, engage and interact with potential customers. Here is a list of 20 essential tools and their USP’s to help you grow your twitter presence and manage it.

1. Listen with Topsy

Listen and research before you speak on twitter. With this it helps you find your target audience and see their way of engagement, in turn will get you a strong following in synch with your brands purpose and passion. With topsy.com a twitter search engine let’s you see what your potential customers are talking about. Helps you get a better understanding with providing results of past hour, week, 20 days, month or all time as per your band requirements.

2. Build your network with TweetAdder

The best way to build your network is to target your content specifically to those who would be interested in following your brand and make it really interesting and valuable. With TweetAdder an automatic system that helps you get quality twitter followers. It can be used as a tool to create your Twitter Followers to one hundred in an exceedingly short amount of time. Majority of significant users can grow the Twitter Followers to one or two million within the time span of twelve to eighteen months. It helps businesses filter potential customers by keyword, location, regency, language spoken etc.

3. Engage with Tweetdeck

Engaging with potential customers on twitter makes them your future paying customers. Tweetdeck makes the flow of engagement smooth on twitter, by being a real-time browser and connecting with contacts this makes engaging with your followers quick and easy. You can monitor various search terms, hashtags and accounts. You can create Twitter groups to follow only those who tweet about certain topics, and set filters for the same.

4. Retweet with Hootsuite

Retweeting on Twitter is one of the best way to engage with fellow users. You actually don’t need a tool to retweet if you are handling only one account. But consider handling multiple accounts and that too you don’t want to go with the new Retweet button and want Comment/Quote/Conventional Retweets. Hootsuite is a perfect tool for this, it will automatically select the profile and retweet it the way you want.

5. Schedule with Buffer

A lot of times brands create their presence online and forget about the existence of the page, with that you cannot build a relationship with your followers. Relationship is formed on the basis of consistent flow of content, interaction. Thus with Buffer which is deemed to be smarter way to tweet, you can schedule your tweets in slots as per the way you want it to be posted throughout the day. And at times you can leave to buffer to select the best time for your brand.

6. Curate with Paper.li

Wouldn’t you like a way to keep providing good content to followers when you are busy and can’t tweet? Paper.li is a unique application that allows you to collect tweets and curate them either manually or automatically. With this app you can collect top tweets from followers, people who mention you or if there is a specific list. Paper.li also allows your brand to show gratitude to your followers by telling them that their tweets were important.

7. Join Tribes with Triberr

Normally brands are obsessed with numbers! But in this case it works as the amount of follower does play a large role. With the amount of followers you have that will determine the type of tribemates and how many members your tribe will have. If you have 10,000 instead of 100 followers, people will be more inclined to send you an invite. When you share their content, you will bring it in front of a bigger audience. Retweets from people with a lot of followers boost credibility as well. This is great way to drive traffic.

8. Recurring updates with Social Oomph

Social Oomph has a great feature where you can create a reservoir of tweets. All you need to do is keep updating your reservoir and Social Oomph will randomly/sequentially tweet them and will put back the tweets to the reservoir for later use. That keeps your content mix circulating and also avoids your Twitter account from being monotonous.

9. Search with Social Mention

Positive or negative reviews and mentions of your brand are no longer slowly making their way through the grapevine. In today’s digitally driven world, they are spat from the virtual mouth of social media users and bloggers and these mentions spread like wildfire. Social mention allows you to type in your company/brand name or keyword/hashtags and find out what they are talking about your brand. You can create a “social alert” which is like Google alerts but for social media mentions.

10. B2B with Argyle Social

Did you know that a large amount of business owners use Twitter for B2B Lead Generation? A recent study published by Media Bistro reported that 82% of all leads generated through social media are referred from Twitter. So to tap this and make this lead permanent, with the help of Argyle social you can calculates how many clicks a link you post gets, and which networks visitors to your website have come from. It is even a great tool for brands who want to track lead referrals from a Twitter advertising campaign. The tool allows users to create campaign codes that tracks all sign ups or registrations coming from your advertisement’s landing page.

11. Monitor with Refollow

Sometimes you need to unfollow those who do not follow back, and often, you need to know who is less active and even absent from Twitter. ReFollow does a similar thing: it allows you to visually inspect your state of followers, and give you a quick overview of the state of your brands account as well as options for unfollowing those who are shunning your brand image. Like the saying goes 1 bad grape can spoil the rest, so Refollow can monitor for you and find that bad grape!

12. Marketing on the Go with Uber Social

The Twittersphere never sleeps! Or doesn’t wait for you to comeback on the desk so you can post that tweet. In the generation of Smartphone, comes to its aid Uber Social which is a platform which provides marketing on the go. Where you can read tweets and see what your potential customers are saying, reply to them and continue the same level of engagement without any hindrance.

13. Track your influencers with Twellow

Having influencers associated with your brand increases its credibility. Thus with Twellow you can track them, This Twitter tool offers an easy way to track and follow influential users within a specific niche or field. Twellow categorizes each list according to different niches. For instance, you can locate the most influential tweeters under the topic of your industry. In addition, you can get results based on location, an enormous benefit to any local business looking to make connections within their city, country or neighbourhood.

14. Tweet at the right time with Tweriod

The most effective way of communicating with customers is when they read the content. Thus it is very important to tweet at the right time and when they see it then it leads to engagement. With Tweriod it will analyze the followers of your brand page and determine a schedule of which is the best time to tweet. With this information you will gain more exposure and be able to tweet at the right time.

15. Dig Deeper with Advanced Twitter Search

This tool is in-built with Twitter; and has been highly un-utilized by many marketers. Advanced Twitter search allows you to dig deeper by running searches based on hashtags, specific names or phrases, people, places and more. So by using this it helps you get a bigger picture of your brand in real-time.

16. Get your Statistics with Twittercounter

To know where your brand stands on twitter and to check if your strategies are working, brands lean on statistics. With Twittercounter it gives comprehensive stats on all important Twitter activities, including number of followers, numbers following, and number of tweets. It also provides a graph displaying the twitter outputs versus follower numbers, clearly showing how well content is being received.

17. Sometimes 140 characters aren’t enough thus Twitlonger

A lot of times great content can’t be Concise to 140 characters and when trimmed it loses its essence. Now with Twitlonger you don’t need to worry about a few extra letters as it posts your content for you and doesn’t cut out the true meaning of the content.

18. Track about your brand with Cotweet

It’s important to know what your customers are saying about the brand, it may be good or bad. With the insights you receive, work on the shortcomings or continue being better. Thus with Cotweet a Twitter marketing tool for companies who want to engage, track, and analyze conversations about their brand. It allows you to manage your Twitter accounts, collaborate with multiple users, track clicks and limited analytics, schedule tweets, keep conversation history.

19. Search Hashtags with Twitter Toolbar

Hashtags(#) are tools to make words more searchable, allows Twitter users to tap into a Twitter-wide conversation. This will also help you connect with customers who have similar interests like your brand. With using Twitter Toolbar you can search terms, keywords and people by entering them into the toolbar at the top of the page on Twitter. For example, if you are in sales, try searching #sales and related keywords you have identified using the Google Keyword Tool will help you get the desired results.

20. Customize with Sharedby

This tool lets you create a custom sharing bar that goes with any links you share through their service. This custom share bar can have your name and social sharing icons as well as links to your website and even a Tweet button which recommends your Twitter accounts. It can be installed as a bookmarklet on your browser bookmark toolbar as a quick way to share and with this you customize at the top of every link!

Many brands make social media marketing too hard. There are many tools out there that can help brand pages in saving time and assist in being more effective with social marketing. Brands shouldn’t use the excuse that they aren’t finding time for twitter, as their competitors are tapping this medium right now!

Your turn

What Twitter apps do you use to manage and interact with your Twitter account? What apps are your favorites for Twitter use? Share your thoughts on these and other apps in the comments!

This article is an extract from my recent post on Digital Marketing Ramblings, sharing with Digital Insights’ audience here again-