Essential Twitter Tools

Twitter tools can enhance your Tweeting experience while saving time too. The Twitter tools/ applications bellow will make your Tweeting life a lot easier. Whether you are Tweeting for fun or marketing your business, website, blog, or charitable cause these tools will make everyday life on Twitter a lot simpler. Some of these tools have features that overlap and you may find you only need a of couple tools on this list but please explore decide which suit your needs best. There are tons of Twitter tools/ apps available now and most serve a great purposes but all of the tools listed below can be great additions to your Twitter tool box.
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TweetLater- They offer both a professional and free service. The free service offers more than enough features for most Tweeters( the non-business users anyways). My favorite feature of TweetLater is the automation and scheduling of tweets and direct messages. For TweetLater's Features: TweetLater's Features

OptMeOut- If you feel you are getting to many automated direct messages from TweetLater it can be stopped through OptMeOut. Just visit their Twitter page and follow the instructions, its just 4 simple steps.

TweetDeck- When you have more than 100 followers then you may want to try TweetDeck. It is an Adobe Air desktop application loaded with features on an easy-to-use dashboard. My favorite feature of TweetDeck is its group feature. It allows you to create groups based on interest/ niches and organize your followers into them. This is essential as your following grows it gets overwhelming to keep track of your followers and it keeps you very organized. Here is a list of Tweet Deck's features:

• Tweet directly from TweetDeck
• Stay up to date - view all new tweets in real-time
• Use columns to create your personal dashboard
• Create Groups to easily follow friends, colleagues or other interest groups
• Update Facebook and follow your Facebook friends
• Follow topics in real-time with saved searches
• View @replies and direct messages and manage your conversations
• Never miss an important tweet with notifications
• Share your photos and videos with Twitpic and 12seconds
• And many more Twitter favorites including Stocktwits, Twitscoop and all the most popular URL shortening services

Tweet Burner- This is a great tool to shorten and track your URLs. It is easy to sign-up and very easy to use. In fact you do not even need to sign-up for an account to shorten a link, only if you want to track it. I have even shorten and tracked links that I used on FaceBook and Squidoo. Tweet Burner still has more to offer as their stats page is currently disabled but you can stll track your link's stats under the archieve tab. Under archieves you can look up indivdual stats for your link such has total clicks to your link, how many clicks in the first and last 24hrs. of posting your link, and which sites your link was directed from( like Twitter).

WeFollow- One of the best Twitter directories, if not the best out there. If you are not on it add yourself immediately. Even if you already belong to another Twitter Directory it is a good idea to add your Twitter account to all the directories out there, after all the more exposure the merrier. I feel like the best of Twitter is on WeFollow, so add yourself because you belong with the best!

Friend or Follow- If you want to close the gap between who you are following and who is following back then Friend or Follow is the tool to use. Simply enter your user name and Friend or Follow will bring up all of the users who are not following you back. You can sort them by name, last tweet, age of account, number of followers and following. From there you can decide who you want to follow back are not. You can also view who you are not following back and who are your mutual friends. It can take a lot of time to sort through users and unfollow them so you my want to visit Friend or Follow at least once or twice a week. As far as who to unfollow is up to you, it may turn out you want to follow all those who are not following you back, in that case there is less or no work for you.