10 Twitter Tools – Part 1

There are so many tools and ways to use twitter that I figured 10 twitter tools at a time might be sufficient.  More in a future post.

If you’ve been using twitter for a while you know that tweets can fly by and it’s easy to start thinking, “Hey how am I suppose to read all these?”  It might be good to adopt the mindset of, just let them fly by, and know that you can use twitter search to mine all those messages when necessary.

I mentioned the WordPress plugin WP-Twtip-ID-Plugin in yesterday’s post about commenting as well as the features of TweetDeck, so here are 10 twitter tools listed in no particular order to help you with your tweeting.

1. TweetLater

TweetLater allows you to do quite a few things with twitter, most notably publish scheduled tweets when you’re not available to do it yourself.  This feature is complemented with the ability to receive emails of replies to those scheduled tweets.

TweetLater also allows you to automatically thank people who follow you and automatically follow them.  However, this seems to annoying for a lot of folks.

With TweetLater you can track keywords and phrases on the twitter stream and the results can be emailed to you periodically.

You can integrate TweetLater with your blog as a sidebar widget.  This can be used for personal announcements or even business announcements.  Check out TweetLater here.

2. EasyTweets

EasyTweets tag line is Easy Twitter Marketing.  Here are some of the features it offers:

• Manage multiple twitter accounts from one login
• Schedule posts in the future
• Automatically post an RSS feed
• Track anything you want on twitter
• SMS and email alerts
• Monitor trends in conversations
• and more…

EasyTweets offers paid plans for folks who are a bit more serious about using twitter as a marketing tool.  Update: EasyTweets is no longer available.

3. StockTwits

StockTwits is for folks who like to converse about the stock markets. Their tag line is Real Investors.  Real Ideas.  Real Time.

You sign up at their site and you tweet at their site in 140 characters about the markets – stocks, links, reviews, what folks are trading, etc.  The question they pose is “What are you trading?”

When you’re talking about what you’re trading you enter a dollar sign $ before the stock symbol.  If you’re not talking about a stock symbol then enter a double dollar sign $$ and the tweet ends up on their message stream as well as the twitter message stream.

4. TwttrStrm

TwttrStrm is powered by Squidoo – Ask a question of your Twitter followers and easily gather all their answers in one spot.

You can use it to stage a debate, make a prediction and see who agrees, ask for advice, feedback, etc.

At TwttrStrm you Answer five questions:

1. Ask a question or make a statement
2. Enter your twitter user name
3. Enter a tracker keyword (hashtag) so folks can track your TwttrStrm
4. Pick a category from a pre-defined list
5. Enter a keyword or tag to help folks find your TwttrStrm page

That’s right, after you enter all this information you end up with a web page that people can find at Squidoo.  Check it out here.

5. TweetNews

What do you get when you mashup Yahoo’s BOSS (Build You Own Search Service), Twitter and Google App Engine?  Answer: TweetNews.

Using Yahoo’s search results and Twitter to rank those results produces a page of more relevant news for your search.  Read more about it at Vik Singh’s blog.

6. TwitterCounter Stats

TwitterCounter provides stats on twitter users as well as compare user stats.  You can get your TwitterCounter badge and place it on your blog.

7. TweetChat

TweetChat allows you to “put your blinders on to the twitter-sphere while you monitor and chat about one topic.“  After you login to TweetChat using your twitter login, you type in a room.

A room could be called twitter for instance or palmpre for example.  These are conversations about that keyword or phrase.  You can chat in a room at the TweetChat site without typing the keyword or phrase you’re talking about.  TweetChat automatically takes care of that for you by entering the room name as a hashtag.

8. TwitStamp

TwitStamp allows you to create a stamp or badge that you can place on your blog or any other web presence you have.  They have a few different types of stamps and some nice designs to choose from.  Very nice.

9. TweetSuite

This is actually a WordPress plugin.  TweetSuite allows a blogger to display tweets on their blog about a blog post.  So when you’re reading a blog post with the comments, you place TweetSuite somewhere above the comments section.

You have a comments section but you can also have a tweets section displaying the chatter on twitter about your blog post.

There’s a tweet this link that takes you to twitter so you can tweet about the blog post as well as a retweet next to someone else’s tweet so you can retweet that tweet.

There are sidebar widgets as well that display tweets in various orders.  You can also use a Digg-like badge that displays how many tweets a post has.  There’s a lot there.

Check TweetSuite here.

10. Twitter Grader

Twitter Grader measures the power of a profile.  Enter your twitter profile name and you’ll be graded based on various factors:

• The number of followers you have
• The power of this network of followers
• The pace of your updates
• The completeness of your profile
• …a few others

They also have a list of the Twitter Elite which shows a list twitterers who have a far reach in the twitter community.  Obviously a place to find more folks to follow.

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