Free Twitter Tools Can Help You Manage Your Twitter Account

What is Twitter?

Twitter is a social networking site, with many free twitter tools to help you, that has gained immense popularity.

Think of Twitter as the internet way of text messaging. Why do I say that? You will very quickly see that Twitter only lets you type 140 characters and that includes your space between words!

Is Twitter Worth the Time?

It depends what you are using it for. If you are just socializing, go for it, have fun. If you are using Twitter for your business it can be helpful if you:

• Find folks in your niche to see what is happening
• Share articles you or someone else has written that will help others
• Follow only the folks that put good information on Twitter
• Share tips with one another that is in your niche

Be Careful When You Automate Twitter

Using free twitter tools I have I made some mistakes. My twitter account has become a huge advertisement for everyone else. Now I'm having to go out and clean it up so it is a more meaningful tool. Remember, if you are using twitter as a business tool be careful.

Would you take a poster to a party and hold it up in front of every that walks through the door advertising your business? If you do I don't think you would be invited to too many more parties.

Search out leaders in your niche to follow.

Automation Twitter Tools

If you plan to spend a lot of time on Twitter, you need to look at automating as much as possible. You will find some help in the list of the following free twitter tools:

• Twollo – allows you to “bulk find” and follow up to 500 Twitterers at a time. If you use this tool, look for folks in your niche and add them. Remember, you may spend a lot of time unfollowing folks if you add them this way.
• TwitReponse - lets you schedule tweets in advance. If you're actively building your website and want to schedule these pages to be sent to your readers, use this tool. Be careful when using this tool to send your pages, you don't want to tweet incomplete works! Make sure you will have the page finished prior to the auto tweet.

• TwInbox - allows you to use Twitter with Outlook (Windows only).

• Tweetburner - allows you to shorten a url for Twitter. Remember you only have 140 characters total.
  1. Tweetburner has a bookmarklet that allows you to drag to your browser, giving you a quick way to create a short URL for any page you come upon that you would like to tweet about.
  2. Tweetburner also lets you track any short URLs you create with it, so that you know who's clicking on them.

• Twitterfeed - tweets whatever is sent out in your RSS feed. So if you blog using WordPress, Blogger or Typepad, your followers will know right away about your newest posts.

• HootSuite - allows you to do many of the tasks discussed above, all from one toolbox.

• Thwirl - is an Adobe Air application for your desktop, which does much of what HootSuite does, including shortening URLs, displaying notifications of new messages, finding tweets that mention your @username, spellchecking, and more. You can also cross-post to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networking sites via Ping.fm.

Do You Have a Local Site?

Are you using Twitter and only have a local business and you want to see tweet from that local area say, New York area? There is help for you also.

• Twitter Local - lets you stay up-to-date with anyone tweeting from a specific location.
• Nearby Tweets - is Web-based, and lets you enter any location (the default is your own location). Useful if you're thinking about writing about a particular area and want to learn what others have to say about it.

Other Useful Tools

If your site has lots of images, you can use TwitPic to upload a photo. You can add a link to your site, so viewers can visit your site. TwitPic then tweets your image text in Twitter.

twtQpon - If you sell digital products, or hard goods, you'll like twtQpon. It lets you offer coupons to your Twitter followers, so you can promote a product in your tweet and provide a coupon for that product.

Use these free twitter tools to automate your twitter account.