7 Awesome Web-Based Tools For Use With Twitter

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Twitter fever! It’s gripped the US, and it’s slowly gripping the whole freakin’ world. If you’re reading this article, then chances are you’ll already know that Twitter is a free web-based social networking service that allows users to communicate to each other with SMS style short messages.

I, your humble Australian reporter, began using Twitter a few months ago. I do have to confess the whole time I was thinking, oh great another inbox to check, I’m sure this will end up just as great as my Facebook account (neglected until I log in for my bi-annual friend acceptance and photo upload session).

Still, the thought of “micro-blogging” aroused my interests.

I’ve seen others using this quite successfully. So I thought I’d cave and give it a shot. I signed up, then emailed a few friends so I didn’t look like a total loser with no one following me. Low and behold, I actually started using the thing (posting links to Internet marketing and lifestyle design stuff mostly). I even gained a few followers! A slight thrill came over me… I have no idea who all these people are, but I like the fact that they like what I’m saying! So I stepped upon the soapbox and never looked back.

After months of experimentation and learning how to use twitter in order to get the best potential out of it, it became clear that just using the web interface (at this stage anyway) isn’t taking full advantage of this incredible platform. I needed tools. And since I like to do everything web-based, I needed web-based tools.

1. Bit.ly

Pretty much as soon as you start using twitter you realise that you can’t post too many links that don’t go scrolling right off the damn screen. You also may realise that you need a URL shortening service.

I experimented with a few, and while Bit.ly doesn’t have the easiest access (TinyURL has the coolest Firefox plugin imho), it’s service does have the best features. You can shorten any URL free of charge, but not only that, you also get built in Analytics. Just add a + (plus) sign to the end of your Bit.ly URL and you’ll go to the analytics page for that shortened link. From here you can see a live tally of your analytics by clicks or if you prefer broken down by region. Bit.ly also features a section on how much your link has been retweeted by others (and not just on twitter).

2. Tweet Later

Tweetlater is an awesome web-based scheduling service. Going on holidays? Want to reach your overseas followers who might think you don’t actually exist? Great. Then this tool is for you.

Setting up automatic tweets is an outsourcing automation nut’s wet dream. It’s fantastic for scheduled blog posts. For example, you go away for two weeks and still need to maintain your blog. Rather than getting up early on your nice vacation, schedule your blog posts, schedule your tweets about your blog posts and relax. Check on it every couple of days to make sure everything is coming off okay and you’re on easy street. Never forgo a nice vacation sleep-in again.

3. WeFollow

This is a user powered twitter directory service. From the creators that brought you Digg comes this most excellent directory.

The directory is sorted by the number of followers which is great for finding the thought leaders in your niche, or even potential business niches. To help with that as well, everyone has tags that they would like to be recognised by. This means that if I want to know who are the big players in the #travel space to help me promote my new travel based product, it’s easy to find out who matters.

4. Nearby Tweets

As the name suggests you can find people in a specific location, worldwide, talking about the topics your interested in. It is really as simple a concept as it sounds, but highly useful. Let me explain with an example.

I just typed in Brisbane, QLD, Australia talking about SEO and literally brought up people that are talking search engine optimization that live nearby to me. I can now follow a few of these people that I find interesting and expand my following network in highly relevant ways. Now that is exploiting the true power of twitter my friends.

5. BackTweets

BackTweets is a search engine that allows you to search for mentions of a specific url. The power of it comes in the fact that it interprets shortened URLs too! So I can search for codemyownroad.com and it will automatically resolve all the short urls that point to my domain. Fantastic tool for finding people that have tweeted your links without your username and shortened their own link with their favourite service.

6. Retweet Radar

Excellent for finding out what the twitter-verse is talking about. In near real time, this service scans the twitter verse for common words being said. It works in similar ways to the trends service already available in twitter itself, but guages what is being retweeted as a means of judging popularity of a topic.

It also allows you to see aggregate trends over the day and yesterday which is a handy feature for seeing what trends have peaked overnight. Other features include most retweeted and top links retweeted. You can even get hourly trend updates straight to your twitter account, updating you about the hot terms, people and URLs being retweeted; just follow @retweetradar.

7. TweetStats

Graphing your tweets. It was inevitable really, everyone likes pretty graphs and TweetStats provides. Just enter your twitter username and you get a host of cool statistics including Tweets Per Day (TPD) and Tweets Per Month (TPM), your Tweet Density which is the days and times you are most likely to tweet, and the big one for me, Aggregate Hourly Tweets and Aggregate Daily Tweets giving me a birds eye view on exactly when I’m tweeting the most (Thursday afternoons is a big one for me surprisingly, I would have thought Friday?). If you like cool colours and flashy graphs that make you go “oooo”, then this tool is a must.

Stay tuned for more twittery updates this week in our Twitter Tactics mini-series! Subscribe to the CMOR RSS feed to get it straight to your reader.