5 Time-Saving Twitter Tools For Busy Business Owners

Lately I’ve been doing a lot of Twitter-related work, helping out some very busy business owners to organize and manage their Twitter accounts. Which, ironically, left me with very little time or energy to keep up my own tweeting - a typical case of “shoemaker’s children”.

Dealing with a social network notorious for sucking up all the free (as well as not-so-free) time while in a terrible time-crunch made me appreciate some of the fantastic Twitter tools out there. I know, I know, there are plenty of lists out there that list dozens of great Twitter tools:

• Top 5 Best Twitter Tools for Business
• 7 Tools for Best Twitter Experience
• 47 Awesome Twitter Tools
• 99 Essential Twitter Tools
• and finally 100 Tools to Achieve All Your Goals

If my list seems a bit underwhelming, remember that it is mainly for very busy entrepreneurs who have less than an hour to spend on ALL their social media of which Twitter is just one part. 

1. Finding New Friends on Twitter

 Twellow – a directory of public Twitter accounts that is easy-to-search (if sometimes slow to load). Armed with some keywords or categories, you can find and start following a lot of people in no time.

2. Scheduling and Keeping Up with Tweets

Hootsuite – while for some tweet scheduling seems like robot behavior, others (including myself) use it from time to time. Due to my schedule, I can tweet only late at night when most of the people I follow head off to bed. Scheduling tweets on Hootsuite gives me and my tweets a chance to be seen during the day.

But Hootsuite is more than a scheduling service. I use it to create lists of people by interest which makes it easier to track who said what about what and when. Plus it makes planning DMs and other messages a bit easier. I may decide to contact people from my virtual assistants list on Mondays; from my content writers list – on Tuesdays; from my Inspiration list – on Wednesdays, etc.

3. Discovering New Conversations

Twitterfall – I just started using this tool a couple of weeks ago and it’s been great (I do have to change the speed to Lower from Default). The idea is you enter your keywords, phrases, or hashtags into the Search and watch relevant tweets appear on your desktop in real time.

Except it’s more useful than that. When and if a particular tweet caught your attention, you can choose to DM, Follow, or Reply to the author or to Favorite, Retweet, Report or View the tweet (notice how there are 7 actions you can take, like 7 colors of the rainbow! this kind of stuff just makes my inner geek feel warm and fuzzy)

4. Doing Twitter Housekeeping

Refollow – I use it whenever I need to do some maintenance work, such as figuring out which of the people I follow don’t follow me back yet; who hasn’t tweeted in a while; find people I followed previously and then unfollowed, etc.

You can set up a lot of different filters and view information about your friends, fans and followers at a glance (sorted every which way). You can also do mass Follow, Unfollow, and Block.

Sometimes, when Refollow is unaccessible or when I only need to do “light dusting”, I use FriendOrFollow. It’s similar to Refollow, but with fewer options. Although, they do have an option of exporting results to a CSV file, for easier analytics and tracking. Which brings me to the next and final tool…

5. Getting Measurable Feedback

TwitterAnalyzer – does anyone read your tweets? How many RTs do you get? How big of an audience to do reach, both directly and indirectly? That’s the kind of questions that can be answered and graphed with this tool.

It can also show you, in a pie-chart format, the top subjects and hashtags you tweet about (they might not be what you think). And that’s just from the User menu. There are also menus that show you stats related to your Friends (I particularly like the Disregarded Friends graph), Mentions, and Groups.

These 5 tools have been huge time-savers for me. Of course, since each of these tools is very interactive and social, there’s danger of spending hours playing with them (or is it just me). So don’t forget to have your business goals in mind, your daily task list in front of you and your kitchen timer next to you before you start.

Technorati Tags: social media marketing, social networking, Twitter, small business

Related posts:

1. Whom to Follow on Twitter
2. Twitter Tools, Part 1: Get in Touch
3. Twitter Tools, Part 2: Stay in Touch