“Free tools to tweet like an expert”

Twitter has become one of the predominant social media tools used, personally and in business. It is important to take advantage of many of the available tools out in the market so as to tweet effectively. Now, there are certainly many premium paid tools that can give all-in-one solutions, but if you’re like me on a shoestring budget or just not big enough a business yet, you’ll appreciate these creative means to get what you need.

Here I will introduce a few quick tools that are mostly on a freemium model (if you pay for premium mode you get full functions), and provide basic tools that I have found to be very useful in managing my twitter account.

1. Sort influencers

friendorfollow

The first tool I’m going to recommend is Friendorfollow.com. This tool’s basic free function allows you to sort your followers based on their number of followers, follower/following ratio, tweets per day etc. This is very critical in finding who are your influential followers so that you target them with your messages, and make sure you follow and interact with them. I would suggest putting them into a ‘Influencers’ list so you can monitor their tweets. Using influencers to retweet your message is fundamental to tweeting, and the quick and dirty way of gauging is by number of followers.

2. Tweet at the correct time

tweriod

Timing is critical in tweeting, and you want to tweet at the period where your followers are the most active and checking/retweeting stuff. Depending on your followers, you might be quite surprised what you think is the best time to tweet as they have different lifestyles. Use tweriod.com to find the optimum online period and exposure for your tweets, even sorted across weekends and weekdays. The prime hours are stated and you can also see the activity graph for other peak hours if you want to tweet multiple times a day.

3. Follow influential people

twellow

Use twellow.com as a twitter directory to find the most popular influential opinion leaders in your industry. Sorted into categories and even subcategories, you can easily find your business segment and the appropriate thought leaders you should be following to keep up to speed. You can also add yourself into the directory list so others can find you.

If you follow an expert in the field and tweet to them, they might respond to an appropriate subject, giving you credibility and visibility. They are also normally first to know of major events in your field, so do keep track of whom to follow.

4. Manage who you follow

manageflitterunfollow

It is important to keep a healthy follower/following ratio, typically the higher the better. @Eminem is the extreme badass in this category, having over 15.7 million followers and following ZERO.

People give you more credibility and authority the more followers you have, yet will tend to discount your influence if you follow too many others. They might even mistake you as a spam bot, or just a try-hard that follows others in return for followers. In any case, to maintain a good follower/following ratio there are multiple tools like unfollowers.me, which is really simple tool. I however, like to use manageflitter.com, as it’s more clean and has better sorting abilities like influence, talkative/quiet, not following back, no profile picture etc.

You can easily unfollow by clicking the huge unfollow button beside the user, but note that the free version has a limited number of unfollows you can use per day.

5. Analyze your own account followers

follwowerwonk

Use followerwonk.com for a very detailed and useful analysis of your own account, or of your followers and their followers. This gives you a lot of information like tweet timings, authority scores of followers, who are their followers, geography, age and a plethora of other useful details. It even has a most frequently used word tag cloud.

Knowing your follower or the type of follower you want is critical in crafting your tweets and also choosing who to engage. The catch is that you need to know who to look up first, which you should be able to find out from the tools introduced above. After you know who to gather information on, use followerwonk for the report breakdown.

There is a daily limit of how many reports you can get in the free version, so make it count! It’s about 5 free reports I think. Also, any user with more than 850,000 followers can’t be analysed due to heavy resources needed to process this report.

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