If you’ve read my previous posts on this blog, you know by now that I’m a huge fan of Twitter.
And Twitter has been good to me; it’s my number one source for traffic to my website. But that’s not the only reason I love Twitter. I’ve met people from around the world who have helped me to advance my career.
Bloggers in Malaysia, Wales and elsewhere have promoted me and asked me to write for their blogs. Consequently, I consistently enjoy book sales around the world.
I often hear authors say that they “just don’t get Twitter.” Or they say that it’s not useful to write about what they had for lunch.
Well, it’s rarely a good idea to discuss your lunch menu unless you write cookbooks. And I do understand that microblogging can be challenging to get the hang of at first.
But once you learn how to use Twitter, the rewards can be big. It’s a lot of fun, too.
There are numerous applications that can help you to become more efficient on this platform. I use several of the apps below.
So without further ado, let me introduce some of these time-saving tools to you.
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My Top Tweet
Enter the username of any user on Twitter and this app will analyze their tweets and show you their most retweeted tweets. The app will instantly analyze that person’s past 3200 tweets to show you their top 10.
For example, I used @JFbookman’s username to test this app. MyTopTweet showed me his tops tweets.
Why would you use this application? Well, you can use this app to discover what your colleagues are tweeting and see their results.
Also, you can use this app to determine what content performs well enough that you’d want to retweet it. Or you can use it as a content curation tool.
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SocialBro
SocialBro offers a variety of features:
- Find new followers
- Import email database
- Discover your best times to tweet
- Launch direct message campaigns
- Easily discover retweeters
- Twitter analytics
- Insights and statistics
- Follower retention
What’s the downside to this app? SocialBro has a steep learning curve and as you add followers and as you follow more people, the monthly fee increases.
Besides, Twitter offers analytics for free, and so many people misuse direct messages that some users – like me – delete them without reading them.
However, SocialBro integrates with Buffer, a robust scheduling application that now integrates with Pinterest, and if you want to know when your tweets need to hit your followers’ timelines, this may be an application worth trying for a couple of months. I suggest you start with the free version.
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Hashtagify
I love this app! Type in any hashtag and Hashtagify will rate its prominence on Twitter. In this example, I used #amwriting. The highest rated hashtags were #ASMSG (Authors Social Media Support Group) and #IARTG (Indie Author Retweet Group).
How can you use this information? Use these hashtags in your tweets, when appropriate, to increase your retweets. By the way, #amwriting and #writingtips were the lowest rated hashtags in this particular analysis. Results change depending on the time of day you enter a hashtag.
The app will also tell you who the top influencers are who use a particular hashtag. In this example, I used #amwriting.
This application is available for free. Hashtagify describes itself as “the most advanced Twitter Hashtags search engine.” Since its development in 2011, it has analyzed 3,696,922,062 tweets.
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Twitonomy
A free Twitonomy account will provide you with a colorful analysis of your Twitter profile with information about the users you most often reply to, mention and retweet. It will also tell you the number of lists other users have added you to since you opened your account. And the app lists your most retweeted tweets and those messages that received the highest number of favorites.
Here is just some of the information available to you.
You can also enter the Twitter handle of anyone you know.
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Swayy
Funny that this application should appear on lists about Twitter. I’ve always viewed this tool as a content curation application. However, I do use it primarily with Twitter.
Let me back up. Once you sign up with the free version of this app, you will tell Swayy the keywords for your main interests. Every morning, Swayy will send you an email with links to five of the top blog posts in your niche or subject area.
What’s cool is that you can schedule your tweet or add a post to LinkedIn or Facebook as well. You can share the blog post immediately, in an hour, or a range of variations over the next 24 hours. Yep. This handy tool saves me a ton of time.
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Bluenod
I haven’t used this app within the last year, but I used to use it frequently to help me find new followers. You can enter a username or hashtag, and the app will produce a detailed map of that user’s community.
Type in a user or hashtag and see a detailed map or visualization about the community around the user or the people using the hashtag. This is what my map looks like:
You can click on each of those blue dots to see who I’m following or who’s following me and determine whether you find that user interesting enough to follow as well.
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Twubs
If you enjoy taking part in Twitter chats, this application is the one to use.
What I like about Twubs is that you’ll never need to enter the Twitter chat hashtag. Just type your tweet and Twubs will add it for you. You can also see what everyone is tweeting during the chat right from Twubs.
In addition, you can use this app to discover conversations and if you want to host your own chat, you can use Twubs to create a branded hashtag page. Finally, you can use Twubs to register a hashtag for your chat.
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ManageFlitter
With a free account, you can unfollow users who aren’t following you back. With a paid account, you can do so much more.
- Sort your followers and those following you.
- Find new people to follow after setting up specific criteria.
- Use its PowerPost feature so that your tweet will be sent when most of your followers are on Twitter.
- Track keywords.
- Follow users that colleagues or mentors are following.
- Make sure that you never unfollow certain users.
This is another app that I rely on because it makes my Twitter experience more efficient and informed.
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Topsy
Editor’s note: Topsy is no longer available.
Topsy is a search engine for Twitter. You can type in your username or a hashtag of your choice. In this example, I used the hashtag #amwriting.
In the previous hour, there were 480 tweets with this hashtag; in the previous four hours there were 3.1 thousand tweets.
You can use this app to find influencers on a specific topic, find the most recent and relevant tweets based on a keyword search, and to see what’s trending under a specific hashtag.
There are also applications I haven’t mentioned that you can use to schedule your tweets. To learn about these social media dashboards, refer to an earlier post I wrote, Social Media Dashboards for Authors: Free Apps May Not Be Your Best Option.
Which Twitter tools are your favorites?
Photo: bigstockphoto.com.
