Glenn Garnes asked me to be on his blog talk radio show a couple weeks ago, to talk about my top 10 Twitter tools that I use to save time. It turned out to be a helpful show because we talked about most of my favorite Twitter tools and some of Glenn’s favorites.
Building Relationships with Twitter and Help Thy Neighbor
Twitter saves time in deciding whom you want to build a relationship with. You can review a person’s online reputation by reviewing their Twitter profile; LinkedIn profile; Facebook, etc. : all of their Social Media posted online.
Glenn and I also reminded people to use Social Networking (especially: Twitter) to research people whom you want to establish and build relationships with. When you’ve found someone you would really like to meet on the phone or in person, call them. Use Twitter to find relevant people you want to do business with or help, -especially the non-profits. Find ways to touch the lives of others and improve them. There’s nothing more rewarding.
Twitter is evolving us as a human race: here’s why
We have access to brilliant minds who are in Twitter. These thought-leaders, inspirational people, marketers, CEOs, designers, politicians, entreprenuers, and many other innovative people are sharing their thoughts –literally–through Twitter. We are bound to grow as a human race when more people participate in Twitter and share more ideas that help others. “Help thy neighbor” is alive and thriving in Twitter.
Lori Gama’s Top 10 Twitter Tools
1. My absolute favorite tool is PeopleBrowsr. You might be using Tweetdeck right now, to manage your groups of people but you will want to uninstall that software and create a free account with PeopleBrowsr to manage all your people connections, not only in Twitter, but in Facebook, LinkedIn, Plaxo, Digg, YouTube and many other Social Media Web sites. Highlights of PeopleBrowsr:
- Organize your people into groups: your favorite bloggers; your favorite Social Media gurus; non-profits; and so on. This makes it easier to monitor their tweets.
- Hover over the avatar of the person you want to re-tweet or reply to or DM and click on the appropriate button: this saves time of copying/pasting and typing.
- View your followers on a world map: click on the map icon at the bottom of your stack of people and see where they are in the world. Makes you appreciate the power of what you’re doing: reaching a global audience.
- Use the “reports” tool for research: see who is retweeting you; who is talking about you that your not following and many, many other reports.
- Create campaigns.
- Schedule tweets.
- Set up email alerts.
- The list of tools within PeopleBrowsr is long and still growing. Dive in and start managing your people connections.
2. Bit.ly: a URL shortner: If you’re not using PeopleBrowsr, and need to shorten your URL link that you included in a tweet: use Bit.ly. Not only can you easily shorten URL’s but Bit.Ly keeps track of your shortened URL’s, which is handy in case you need to refer to them again. You can view how many clicks your URL’s have received, too. Works best in Firefox.
3. Search.Twitter.com: Research and development is critical before your venture into new territory, whether it’s a new online business or finding a niche market: Search.Twitter.com is one of the best tools to use. You can type in a keyword into the search box; tweets are listed that have mentioned that keyword; sometimes there are links called “View conversation” and see the exchange of tweets between people that evolved around that topic of conversation. Trending topics are listed here in the right column. You can also use Search.Twitter.com to find groups of people you’d like to follow. I can’t live without Search.Twitter.com. It’s almost the “Google of Twitter,” not quite but very good.
4. Twellow.com: The Yellow Pages of Twitter. (This is one of Glenn Garnes’ favorites). This tool stores data from people who have registered on Twellow with a location. You can choose a geographical area on a world map and drill down to the country, state and city. Find people in your neighborhood that you can connect with. Register yourself so you can add your Twellow profile. You’ll be listed in the order of number of followers. As Glenn pointed out on his show, if you’re in the top handful of people in Twellow, that’s the equivalent of being on the cover of the yellow pages. That was an excellent point to make because, not only is Twellow free, unlike the Yellow Pages, but it showcases you if you have a lot of followers. If not, you’ll still find this tool helpful in finding people to follow, not only in your area but by searching categories of people.
5. Hootsuite.com: You can set up several profiles within Hootsuite and manage them all here. Handy for companies who have set up a customer service tweeter or a technicial support tweeter: they can each manage their Twitter profiles from Hootsuite. You can see statistics of how many people clicked on your URL’s and what area of the world they live in. You can also pre-schedule tweets.
6. TopFollowFriday.com: See who endorses you and who gets the most “#FollowFriday” endorsements.
7. One of Glenn Garnes’ favorites: FlashTweet.com. You can “mass” follow or “mass” unfollow people. You can target your following list to follow certain groups. First find someone in an industry who is an expert; and use FlashTweet to automatically follow the people that expert is following. I really like this tool to save time in weeding out people I’m following that I no longer find interesting due to their tweets no longer being useful or due to their not tweeting very often.
8. Twollo.com: Auto subscribes you to follow people based on keywords you’ve input into your Twollo account. If someone is talking about “business networking” and you’ve tagged that as a keyword, Twollo will automatically start your Twitter account following anyone who’s mentioning that keyword. Perhaps, it’s your name and your company’s name that are the keywords you want Twollo to pick up on–to automatically follow someone who has mentioned your name (that you’re not already following, of course). Glenn recommends that you think about the keywords that are relevant to your business and use those. It’s an excellent way to save time and find relevant people.
9. The Twitter Tag Project: saves your previous FollowFriday endorsements so you can run them again or rotate some. FollowFriday is a hash tag name for people you endorse. We do it every Friday. This is handy if you want your new followers to know about your previous endorsements or if you’re short on time and want to participate in FollowFriday.
10. SplitTweet.com: Another one of Glenn Garnes’ favorites. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks very useful. Manage several Twitter accounts within one administration panel. Sort of what Hootsuite does but what’s really cool is that this tool helps you “listen” to your brand mentions. Whenever someone tweets about your brand, SplitTweet displays that tweet in your SplitTweet account. You want to “listen” and take action: corrective or at least tweet a “thanks.”
One more very important Twitter tool: don’t forget to use Twitter’s “Help” section. Found in the upper right menu in your profile. You can find answers to basic questions and the in’s and out’s of the tools that are within Twitter.com. You can see “troubleshooting issues” that they’re working on. You can view others trouble tickets. If there’s a problem with Twitter, it’s the first place I come to when trying to find out from Twitter itself if it is aware and working on the issue.
Those a a few of my favorite and Glenn Garnes’ favorite Twitter Tools. Hope you find them helpful, too. Please leave me a comment and suggest others, if you like. Be sure to leave your Twitter name as a link so we can follow you and find out more about you.
