Social media channels have rightly been identified as excellent ways not only to network, but to also indirectly grow and manage your sales, develop your brand identity, and widen your leads base.
If you have decided to use twitter as your main lead generating/networking channel, you probably also realize that it can be a time consuming challenge – you need to generate followers, follow back those who follow you, unfollow those who are no longer active, produce interesting content, soft sell your products and services, respond to tweets, forward interesting links etc. It could take all day!
Enter in Twitter Tools. These are tools designed to help you manage your twitter accounts (and in a lot of cases, your social media accounts) effectively. While these tools are not a complete substitute for the personal touch your twitter account requires, they do a great job of helping you schedule and analyze your data.
Here are some of my favorites:
HootSuite: HootSuite is a unified dashboard, which allows you to manage multiple social media accounts – twitter, LinkedIn, and facebook, for example – in a single go. You can schedule posts ahead of time, and track and analyze data. You can download HootSuite for your iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry and Android mobile device as well. Currently, HootSuite claims over 2 million users.
Social Oomph: Social oomph contains all the basic features a user could want, such as tweet scheduling, direct messaging, and automatic follows. It also has a more advanced paid for section which allows you to manage your facebook account, submit social updates via email, schedule and publish blog posts, and find friends using keywords.
Cotweet: Cotweet helps you schedule tweets, track keywords (great feature to have) and analyze the data you collect. You can use it to cover your facebook accounts as well. They have a Standard feature, more suited to individuals and smaller businesses, and an Enterprise feature for medium to large organizations, which supports unlimited users, advance workflow, third party integration (including salesforce.com) and unlimited conversation history.
Proxlet: In addition to the standard features, proxlet lets you block apps, mute users, and filter hashtags. It works on both the web and with mobile clients. You can also use it with TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone, and Spaz to name a few. It’s ideal if you want pure information, as you can cut out the chatter and turn your Twitter feed into an RSS reader by showing only tweets with links.
BrandChirp: This is a paid for tool, though they do offer you a free trial. It is better suited for brand management on twitter and helps you monitor and manage brand activates. You can follow users based on location and other criteria, including tweeting activity and credibility. You can manage multiple accounts, submit RSS feeds as tweets and of course, schedule your tweets in advance.
Mentionmapp: Mentionmapp has often been called a relationship tool as it lets you search for twitter users by name and get a quick view of your conversation graph. The conversation graph or mention graph lets you follow conversations and step in for those you find relevant. It lets you build a relationship with them, and you can also check out who’s checking your own mention-graph and befriend them.
NutshellMail: If you use email regularly, then you might want to consider Constant Contact’s NutshellMail. This is a service that allows you to manage your twitter (and LinkedIn, and facebook) accounts from your inbox. You can see mentions, track results, tweet, respond, and use your direct messaging services.
