Tools For Managing Twitter The Right Way
Twitter has a ton of different uses – and still more coming to light on a daily basis. It’s no surprise then that new applications keep springing up to assist you in managing a site that’s basic by necessity. The beauty of Twitter is its simplicity, but occasionally you find you need features that it simply doesn’t carry. That’s where the better web applications come in.
There are applications for all aspects of Twitter-use. For example, the age old technique for harvesting an enormous troupe of followers on Twitter. Generally you find folk with similar interests, then spend a huge amount of effort following them in the hope that they’ll follow you back. It’s time-consuming, but it’s been proven to work. And this micro-management of your followers at least ensures that you’ll have a follower-base who are actually interested in your links.
It’s a pain, but it’s a chore those of us who spread our words via the micro-blogging site have to endure to bump up the numbers. Thankfully, there are web-based applications designed to help with this and other Twitter -typical issues. Like searching all logged tweets or finding out just how popular your account is. And for vanity searching how many people favourited your better tweets. All this and more can be managed using applications like those we’ve listed below.
The daddy of all tweet-specific search engines, this is the best designated Twitter search tool available at the time of writing, and there are a number of ways in which it can be used.
Firstly – hashtags. If you see a hashtag you want to get in on but want to see what came before, plug it into Twitter Search. It’ll list the lot, and you can scan them far easily than is possible actually within Twitter, or Tweetdeck, or whatever engine you use. The same goes for @replies. Say a majorly influential Twitterer has asked a pertinent question and you want to see what kind of replies they got, just plug in @ followed by their name, without a space, and see every public reply they’ve received. It’s also great for harvesting those with a similar interest to yours. Type in a subject – say ‘guitars’, ‘Celebrity Apprentice’ or ‘Death Metal’ – and within an instant, there’re hundreds of tweets where people are discussing just those things. Follow them immediately!
A great little application for the central problem of unfollowing those who didn’t feel they wanted to follow you back. Once you’re signed in – which is really simple as it can be done directly through your Twitter account – you can start checking the people you’re following against whether they took the plunge and reciprocated. Just make sure you re-sync your account every time, or things can get a bit messy.
My Tweeple has added extras too. It keeps a log of former followers, for starters, so you can check on that whenever you choose. It also has a strange, built in game where you can guess which person on your Twitter feed tweeted a certain bunch of words. It’s weirdly distracting. And it also has a very cool area where tweets from your feed are laid out as though in a newspaper – which is totally needless but pretty cool all the same.
This is essentially a stripped down follower monitor, and is useful more for social accounts rather than business accounts. It’s a lot more fun in its presentation than My Tweeple, but has limited capabilities. Essentially you just plug in your Twitter details and, after it has a rummage through your account, it presents you with the avatars of all those individuals you’re following who aren’t following you back.
The only downside with this is that unfollowing is a case of going into every individual profile and doing the business manually, whereas in My Tweeple the process can be automated. All the same, if you’re not managing a huge list, it’s nice to look at and does the job with a flourish.
Managing followers and friends on Twitter sometimes requires a delicate touch. Quite often, without wanting to be cruel, certain tweeters can be annoying. This can be just as much about how busy and time-short you are as it is about how over-prolific they’re being. Sometimes you just need a break from jokey hashtags and silliness. Because you’re actually really flipping busy.
Twitblocker is a nice, sly method of removing certain people from your feed without them ever knowing, and without you having to go the whole hog in unfollowing them. It’s the diplomats choice for a better Twitter experience, and acts as a temporary pair of earplugs for when the babble gets too much. Even better, when you restart your browser, it defaults to your original settings, so you don’t even have to remember who you silenced.
In the basic mode, SocialToo is a useful site for handling your DMs as though they were part of a more manageable email account. In addition, the site makes surveying your followers as easy as pie, so you can start getting stats together from people on your feed almost instantaneously, and all surveys you carry out are logged for later use.
On the premium end the site offers auto-follow tools and what looks to be a great stat engine and emailer, though we haven’t tried these aspects out because we love manually following people, and like to save our money for fun stuff.
A pretty simple tool for checking out the bios of people on Twitter. Currently search engines for Twitter specifically crawl tweets only, so it’s good to know that there’s one specifically designed for checking out what people say about themselves. Could prove particularly useful when networking online. Say you’re looking for a copywriter in London, Tweepsearch could find you one within seconds.
A pretty straightforward stats package for your account that will enable you to see in graph form how many users you’re gaining over time – which is always good for the ego. If you’re currently harvesting followers, it can also let you know how likely you are to hit your target of followers by engineering predictions based on recent activity. Which is pretty smart.
This was a guest post from Liam Tucker of EWM. He knows Twitter. Want to write for the BaseKit Blog? – Drop us an email.
July 06, 2010 at 11:50 am, Andy Whitehead said:
And TweetDeck of course