I love Twitter because of the way it helps you get in touch with people you never thought possible before. It can help your business gain visibility online via building up a fan base of relevant individuals who regularly talk about you. Most companies who value social media as a means to promote their business will use Twitter as part of their social strategy. No matter how focused your strategy is for social media, putting things into action can be tricky if you don’t have the right tools.
Useful and effective Twitter tools can be hard to find, but here’s a list of the top one’s you should be using on your social media campaigns to help improve your visibility and efficiency.
1) Twitonomy
This is perhaps one of the most astounding tools when it comes to the amount of data it packs in. Here you’ll find months’ worth of Twitter data, including mentions, Retweets and follows. Your main dashboard allows you to organise particular followers Tweets, your lists or specific keywords in a manageable way. Your profile section is where all the rich data can be found – everything is broken down to the finest detail from your top fans to in-depth analysis into how you tweet.
Next up is the mentions and RT’s section which gives you the ability to go back in time viewing your top content which received the best engagement. This will help you plan your content in the future as well as knowing who to target it towards as this tool stores exactly who mentioned your posts. It’s also great for making contact lists, so if you want to have quick access to a list of journalists or related blogs to your industry, you can simply add them to your lists and they’re ready and waiting for when your content is hot off the press.
2) Followerwonk
This tool is so good it’s SEOmoz approved. After seeing how useful followerwonk was SEOmoz bought it up and it now comes as part of your subscription. It gives you the ability to search Twitter in a way that wasn’t possible before. If you’re desperate to target your content to a particular audience but don’t know where to find them, this is the tool for you.
For example search via keyword for the term ‘technology blogger’ and followerwonk pulls up a list of profiles which contain these keywords within the author bio – allowing you to reach out with your content to whoever you’re looking for. The tool also allows you to find more relevant audiences via the ‘compare users’ tab, enabling you to search through mutual or un-mutual Twitter followers.
3) Hashtagify.me
I really love this site; it’s a great tool for expanding the reach of your tweets. I’m sure when you’re writing your tweets you’re constantly racking your brain to think of relevant hashtags to help increase the readership of your Tweets. Well this tool does it for you! Type in any hashtag you can think of and it displays relevant hashtags around your topic. It displays them in different size bubbles to help you understand which ones are popular and which ones aren’t. And if that isn’t enough, it even shows you the top Twitter accounts using those hashtags. It’s even just had a recent makeover with a PRO version just added.
4) bitly
This tool is a must for tracking social media promotions. Often if you’re running a particular promotion via social media you can find yourself wondering how am I going to track who’s clicking on the links? Well, set up the URL you want to use throughout your campaign on Bitly and you’ll be able to do just that. You can even customise the URL to look how you want making it clearer for visitors as to where they’re being directed.
Bitly offers stats to show how many clicks and shares the URL’s have obtained as well as geographic data. You can even check what platforms and browsers people have been using to click to your content. It’s these useful stats which can help you measure and quantify the effectiveness of your social media campaigns.
5) Tweriod
Often when you’re scheduling your content to go out via social media you’re might wonder, who’s going to see this? And how can I get the biggest crowd possible to view my content…well, tweriod will help you out. This tool analyses your followers in relation to activity and engagement and plots what times of the day they appear online. This can be viewed for week days as well as weekends helping you plan and schedule your content in order to get the biggest audience – increasing your reach and visibility of your brand.
