Twitter Tools and Techniques

Twitter has become the Wild West of Social Media and is increasingly challenging. Rule number one in my book is publishing meaningful, useful content, not just sophistry. The following are some of the tools you can use to manage your Twitter presence. Readers are encouraged to comment and contribute as this field is expanding geometrically:

EDITING AND PUBLISHING TOOLS:

• Tweetdeck – www.tweetdeck.com - you have to downoad their software but it works well for managing multiple sources and distributions.
• Hootsuite – a very popular web based service for managing Tweets
• Tweet-U-Later – www.tweet-u-later.com – a good service for managing repeating Tweets and time delayed Tweets. Be careful not to over-Tweet and create spam.
• Tweeup – www.tweetup.com – for managing communities and major  of Tweeters. Free initially but want your credit card to start charging for enhanced presence.
• Twitter extensions – expand the character limit of your Tweets using these service, see article at http://theheatweb.com/13-ways-post-longer-tweets-twitter/

TECHNIQUES

• Use # Hash marks to identify key words for others to use in searching.
• Use Twitters search save feature to retrieve content of interest for ReTweeting.
• Use your twitter name with @ to make sure people can find you, e.g. @geoffsharp
• Use Twitter List feature to organizer your inbound Tweets,

MARKETING AND BUILDING PRESENCE

• Always Tweet valuable content. Consider using Google Alerts and similar sources for valuable new content, e.g. ” Human Resources and Social media”
• Tweet out meaningful questions and invite response.
• Send out promotional Tweets related to a campaign or event, e.g. reward responders with a free I-Pad for attending a Webinar.
• Organize Tweetups to build community.

TWITTER MEASURING AND MANAGEMENT TOOLS

• Tweetvolume – www.tweetvolume.com – for a free but simple statistics on Twitter presence of keywords.
• Professional, expensive measuring tools , such as Radian6, usually have Twitter measurement tools.
• Twitteranalyzer – www.twitteranalyzer.com -their web site was down all day when I tried to use this, but has a good reputation.
• Tweetreach – www.tweetreach.com - free and simple profile of Twitter reach.
• Twitalyzer – www.twitalyzer.com -  free and simple Twitter score.
• Tweetup – www.tweetup.com -