7 Essential Steps to be a Smart Twitter
The following tools are essential to your day-to-day twitter-managing: they save time, provide valuable insight and let you build valuable twitter network effectively.
1. Download desktop twitter clients:
Get Tweetdeck or http://desktop.seesmic.com; Desktop tools like these two let you get real time tweet feeds from twitter, send your tweet, easily and quickly share links/pictures in real time. The multiple columns let you monitor tweets, direct messages, replies and relevant tweets from people outside your twitter network. This is especially valuable if you want to know what people are twittering in real time. Refer to the feature comparison between tweetdeck and seesmic.
2. Find people to follow and followers:
It would not be fun or useful if you don’t follow anyone. To find interesting people to follow. You can use twitter’s “find people” tool; However if you are like me who does not want to “invite” lot of my real life friends to twitter, you can always think of what interests you the most in real life. Maybe your favorite airline, favorite sportsteam, actress, blogger? For an easy access, I like to use twitterholic.com, which has straightforward ranking without much advertisement on the site. I also like twittercounter.com which provides ranking, remote widget etc. Other high profile directories include wefollow.com; For local twitters, I favor “localtweeps.com” which just launched in early April, Simple UI, easy-to-find info; As you get more “proficient” on twitter and have your favorite people to follow, watch out for their tweets, often time, they will retweet, quote, point you to other interesting twitters. That is how I get to discover most of people that I recently followed. There are also tools making that easy for you. Check out twibe.com, where everyone can recommend friends; Or Mrtweet.com, a highly computerized tool that will monitor how you tweet, then spit out the recommendations in a few days. Other upcoming tools includes twindeXX.com, which is where other people could suggest people for you to follow based on similar interests.
3. Twitter photo:
Bear in mind, you can’t really upload a photo displayed in your twitter tweets. When people talk about uploading a photo, they are referring to the URL links to photos located outside of twitter.com. Twitpic is one of the best photo tools for twitter out there. All you need is your twitter account and upload your photo to twitpic, which will store your photo on twitpic for FREE, and allow you tweet your picture’s URL with one click. TwitPic even let you use your own unique address to email your photos directly into your TwitPic account from your mobile phone. Super sweet.
4. Understanding Overall twitter trend: use TwitScoop to find what are buzzing on twitter. It also provides “tweeting” data from 6 hours to 3 days. If you use tweetdeck, twitscoop is already installed. To understand the twitter stats by username: give tweetstats.com a try. It’s a fabulous tool that lets you find out tweets per hour, per month, timeline, reply statistics; You can find out any other twitter’s stats using this tool, including your clients, your friends, your competitors, president, celebrities. You name it. There is another tool called Monitter, which helps you see what your local twitters are tweeting about. You can set up certain radius around your location, enter the keywords you want to watch, e.g. your brand name, Monitter will display the tweets in real time. (Warning, if you monitor highly popular keywords, there can be way too many tweets flashing through the screen for you to keep up with. So, don’t try…or try it and see. You know what those keywords are;)
5. Automatic twittering tools:
- Sometime it’s convenient to feed your blog post or RSS feed to twitter. Twitterfeed.com is just such a tool to let you feed any blog entry RSS feed into twitter at the time you specify.
- Although it’s not encouraged, there are lot of tools letting you auto-reply to your followers with a direct message saying Thank you. There are also tools letting you mass-follow and mass-unfollow. Flashtweet.com is somewhat a buggy tool but it gets the job done. Be considerate when you use such tool because it is commonly considered as “spam” behavior.
6. For bloggers or website owners:
Put “twit this” or “tweetmeme” button so your site visitors can twit/retweet your blog post for you. If you use wordpress, you can search both plug-ins and automatically install them with 1 click. Super easy. Twitter also provides its own widgets showing your tweets on your website. Twittercounter has a super popular “remote” widget showing which of your twitter friends visits you.
7. Mobile twittering tools:
Twitter would not grow this fast without 3rd party mobile applications. Among hundreds of them, twitterfon is the #1 FREE twitter app you can get from iTune. It has all the basic features you need to twitter anywhere you go.
Enjoy!
