Twitter is surging in popularity, which means for many businesses, it can become quite a beast to manage and stay on top of. For small businesses in particular, it can eat into your precious time and end up becoming more of a burden.
To make sure you keep on top of your business tweeting and stop it taking over your working life, we’ve picked out some (free) tools that will help you rein in the time you spend on the social network!
The dashboard – Tweetdeck / Seesmic / Hootsuite – Twitter clients are essentially glorified dashboards that allow you see a vast array of different information in one window. For example, you can have direct messages in one pane, mentions in another and your favourite Twitter list. This allows you to quickly and easily take a snapshot of the activity and either take action or move on depending on what you see. The three examples we mention here do all this and a lot more. We are big Tweetdeck fans but the choice is really up to you and your personal preference!
Multiple users – Cotweet / Hootsuite – some businesses will have several people that they want to manage the Twitter account. These two tools allow multiple users to access the same account and pass actions to one another. This can be a really effective way to make sure that the same question doesn’t get replied to multiple times.
Monitoring mentions – Cotweet / Tweetbeep – monitoring mentions of your brand on Twitter is quite easy to do when people use your Twitter ID. But if they don’t then it can be more difficult. Also, wouldn’t it be great just to be alerted to mentions rather than having to log on every time. These two tools allow you to set up email alerts so that anytime anyone mentions your brand on Twitter, you get an email in your inbox. Tweetbeep will allow allow you to set up alerts for any word or keyword.
Blog integration – Twitterfeed – do you tweet your blog posts out to your followers? If you do then you will be interested in this little tool, which simply automates the whole process, meaning it’s one less thing for you to worry about!
Analytics – Twittercounter / Bit.ly - analysing the effectiveness of any marketing campaign is vital but difficult. Twitter is no different. But, Twittercounter is a useful way of charting the number of followers you have and how these have grown over time. Bit.ly is a URL shortener which also has analytics on the back, so you can see how many people clicked on the links in your tweets – all useful information! Bit.ly will integrate nicely into the desktop clients and multiple user tools we mentioned above.
What else is there? Anything we missed out? Let us know in the comments or on Twitter itself!
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