3 Top Tools To Tame Twitter

photo cred­it: Thomas Hawk

As Twit­ter moves into its more mature phase, a num­ber of Twit­ter util­it­ies have emerged, some good, some not so good. I’m an early adop­ter and a daily Twit­ter user and have exper­i­mented with many Twit­ter tools over time. Please feel free to  fol­low me but without fur­ther blath­er, here’s my top 3, must have, twit­ter tools:

• TwitThis.com — Though show­ing its age, Twit­This is a very cool tool. In a nut­shell, simply browse to a web page that you want to share. Click the Twit­This book­mark­let (that you’ve pre­vi­ously installed). If you’re not logged in to Twit­ter, you’ll be promp­ted to do so.  A win­dow pops up, and you can edit your Tweet and then send it to your Twit­ter stream. I like it because for quick Tweets, I don’t have to jump to anoth­er applic­a­tion, load a Twit­ter tab in my browser, etc.
• Twit­ter Twerp Scan — If you care about man­aging your Twit­ter Fol­low­ers, then you need to run the Twit­ter Twerp Scan from time to time. Basic­ally, Twerp Scan checks your Twit­ter account for people with extremely high fol­low­ing to fol­low­er ratios. These are most likely ‘bots or mar­ket­ing drones — who could be poten­tially bring­ing down the value of your ‘Twit­ter Juice’ (is there such a thing? I’m think­ing of Google Juice here, that myth­ic­al elix­er that adds Page Rank to your web­site based on the power of incom­ing links). You can cus­tom­ize your Twerp ratio but if you have a high num­ber of Twerps, the block/removal pro­cess is a bit tedi­ous. Id’ love to see a ‘batch un-follow’.
• TweetLater.com — Ok, you’ve used Twit­ter for a while, are used to updat­ing your fol­low­ers, and have a good social net­work online that notices when you’re not there. Or you’re the Com­mu­nic­a­tions spe­cial­ist for an organ­iz­a­tion that uses Twit­ter to keep your audi­ence informed. Regard­less, you also have a need to pub­lish Tweets on a reg­u­lar basis, then Tweet­Later is for you. Simply, it’s a handy site that allows you to queue-up Tweets, to be pub­lished at a spe­cif­ic time.  One very cool and not-so-obvi­ous fea­ture: you can also set Tweet­Later up to auto­fol­low people who fol­low you. Redu­cing your Twit­ter main­ten­ance chores, though I’d remem­ber to run TwerpScan from time to time 🙂 Just to nuke the Twerps.