Are you a Twitter fan? Twitter is everywhere in the news, it seems. It’s great for keeping in touch with friends, and even addictive, but a lot of people have been using it for more than just idle updates. Twitter’s concept is quite simple, but given the right tools, it can be harnessed into an instrument to help your business, like blogs have become. There are many apps out there, and I encourage you to continually search for the best out there. To get you started, I’ve compiled some tools you can try out.
1. Livetwitting. During the last Worldwide Developer Conference where Steve Jobs delivered his eagerly anticipated keynote to launch the next iPhone, the top tech blogs used Twitter to give almost real-time update to their readers. The speed at which you can broadcast information to a great number of people makes Twitter ideal for live events. Livetwitting extends this capability a little further by giving you the means to format and edit your tweets.
2. Twitter Groups. Ordinarily, your published tweets are sent to all your followers. However, there are times when we want only certain people to read certain updates. For example, random musings only to close friends, while work-related stuff to clients. Twitter Groups makes this possible by allowing you to organize your followers to certain categories, and send targeted tweets to each.
3. Tweet Volume. It’s a great and simple way to measure the popularity of a brand, a person, or a certain product on Twitter. TweetVolume counts the number of times a word or a phrase has appeared in tweets. Right now the data covers everything from the time Twitter started, but the site has plans to include an option for daily, weekly, monthly and yearly counts in the future.
4. Tweet Scan. Going a step further than Tweet Volume, Tweet Scan is a search engine for Twitter. It’s useful to see what people are saying about you or anything else of interest (like your competitors). You can search by keyword, author, and date with results available via email, RSS, and Twhirl.
5. Twitter PollDaddy. Want to know whether people prefer the iPhone over Blackberries? Omelets over pancakes? The possibilities are endless. PollDaddy enables you to easily conduct surveys through Twitter. All you need is a short question and a list of potential answers. This allows you to get a feel for the people’s pulse, and can be an invaluable tool for your business.
6. Twitter Feed. As tweets are really just another way to publish updates, Twitter Feed is a handy way to incorporate Twitter posts to blogs. It gets content from any site that supports RSS feeds and automatically places the link in your twitter account. A lot of people are already doing this manually anyway to get traffic, so Twitter Feed should make things easier.
7. Twit Response. If you have any time-sensitive announcements, TwitResponse will let you write them and publish them later. The means to hold this information until they’re ready is very important in some businesses where timing is everything, especially in dealing with events, holidays, and product launchings.
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