Helpful Twitter Tools

Tweet Deck

I don’t know about you, but I find the standard Twitter.com interface quite inefficient and sometimes very slow moving. That’s why I prefer to use Twitter through a free tool called TweetDeck. TweetDeck is a free downloadable application that works from your desktop and connects to your twitter account.

The main benefits of Tweetdeck is that you can see the main Twitter time line, the mentions you get and your DM’s all on the one screen.

This interface design makes it much easier to manage your Twittering. The other good things about it are you can control multiple Twitter accounts from it, re-tweet with one click and follow/unfollow – all from the one place. You can also see your Facebook timeline too!

Get TweetDeck free here: http://www.tweetdeck.com/download/

Social Oomph

Our next tool is Social Oomph – formerly known as Tweet Later. This tool lets you schedule your tweets, auto-follow people who follow you and send them a DM (direct message) automatically and much more.

Social Oomph offers a free service but there is also the option to upgrade for even more features. Let’s look at the main benefits of using a tool like Social Oomph: (http://www.stuartstirlingonline.com/likes/socialoomph)

1. You can schedule tweets to go out automatically at a time you set. This is great if you aren’t able to send important tweets because you have other commitments. It only takes a few minutes to set up and you can use to automatically post your prepared tweets.

This can be handy for business if you are preparing a product launch or an even such as a teleseminar/webinar and want to keep your followers up to date about it but don’t want to be manually posting to Twitter.

2. You can select the option to auto-follow people who follow you and send them a DM at that time automatically. This is a great way to introduce yourself and make friends quickly. You can add a short message in the DM that goes “thanks for following me. I’m an expert in ABC so please let me know how I can help you.”

Just make sure your message doesn’t go over 140 characters. You probably don’t want to send them straight to your website or else they’ll smell you as just another ‘salesy’ person right away.