Twitter is the Marmite of social networks. Aptly described as ‘the nervous system of the internet’ by podcasting legend Leo LaPorte, it can take some time and effort to get the benefits of real-time 140 character updates.
But there are good reasons to persevere – eCommerce site Zappos recently revealed a Twitter referral results in a $33.66 average order compared to $2.08 for Facebook and $0.75 for Pinterest. And choosing the right Twitter tools can improve the experience immensely as well as helping you to build a bigger following for your personal or company profile or brand presence.
Twitter clients:
Recently Twitter has made several moves to limit the number of third-party clients available, particularly after acquiring services such as Tweetdeck. Whilst it’s still a good option, if you’re looking for a long-term alternative, then Hootsuite has been long established, and is one of Twitter’s new ‘Certified Products’.
Twitter analysis:
For business use, the likes of the Radian6 monitoring and engagement tool provides a great amount of social media insight into your customers. It’s also worth checking out SocialBro which includes a number of account management options, such as segregating accounts which follow you, highlighting who doesn’t follow you back as well as who you aren’t following back yourself yet. Another very useful tool is the analysis of the best times for you to be tweeting, which can then be synched to an account with publishing tool Buffer. That allows you to save any websites or pages you want to tweet, but will automatically publish at the times shown to give you the best response from your followers.
Twitter Backup and Cleanup:
One problem with Twitter has long been that it’s hard to find older tweets, and there’s no backup for your amazing insights and banter. Tweetdownload is a great way to archive your most recent 3,200 tweets locally to store on your PC meaning that you not only have a backup of anything important, but you can then search and analyze everything in an Excel-friendly CSV file.
At the same time, you can also use Tweetdelete to clean up your account by deleting up to 3,200 tweets at a time. Specify a date range to get rid of anything potentially damaging to your reputation, such as those first couple of weeks when you weren’t quite sure what you were doing.
Encourage readers to tweet your website:
Almost every website now has a link to Twitter and the normal social sharing buttons. But you can take it a step further with tools like ClickToTweet, which allows you to generate a custom message and short link. When readers literally click to tweet, it’ll automatically populate with your message and link, making it more likely your readers will share your message and url.
Using the right tools can turn Twitter into a simpler and much more pleasurable, dangerously addictive, experience whether you’re using them for your personal account, a small to medium sized business or looking to manage a huge brand profile.
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With thanks to Ben.