5 Killer Twitter Tools

In the past week I learned of some great Twitter related sites and tools during my attendance of the first official Twitter conference  (140 | The Twitter Conference) in Mountain View, California. Seeing as how I’ve been using Twitter for sometime with out posting much on it, over 2 years now, I wanted to put on a different hat and pass on some knowledge I picked up so those not in attendance could also grow in their use of Twitter.

To frame this post I will tell you that what I got out of the 140 conference is that more and more data tools are being developed to make sense of the vast amount of information being passed through Twitter. You may not think actively about this, but your network is built on common interests or data points if you want to be clinical about it. In either case this data is useful for numerous purposes. As to what purposes I leave that to you to evaluate for your needs.

1. TweetReach
This site is one that is so simple yet so magical. Retweeting is when you forward the tweet of another person to your network of contacts. Retweets are in the purest form word-of-mouth marketing. While Retweeting can be effective not everyone in your network may have the exact same interest as you on every topic you track. Twitterreach gives you a window into who found your Tweet of interest and retweeted it. What sets Twitterreach.com apart is that you can see how many times your Tweet was seen, clicked through and who had the greatest reach in distributing your tweet. A great tool to learn who in your network likes particular topics and has the means to distribute it widely.

2. xefer
Find out when any Twitter user is most active on Twitter. This sounds a little odd, but its a good window into the activity of others as well as your own. This information might come in handy if you’re trying to more scientifically time the release of certain information for widest distribution.

3. TweetBeep
Set up an automated alert to be notified when certain certain keywords are detected in a tweet, when a particular person has tweeted or if someone has tweeted near a particular location or any combination there of. You can also narrow down the alerts by the “attitude” of the post whether positive / negative or if it contains links. Quite a handy way to keep on top of trends and topics.

4. Twist: See Trends In Twitter
Track trends on particular topics or people. The display is in graph form and can be useful in mining data for particular projects. If someone is talking about a topic you have great knowledge of it might just provide you an in to make an introduction.

5. Backtweets.com
Type in a link URL to see who has tweeted/retweeted it and who is discussing it. This is a useful tool in finding other like minded individuals to grow you network. So simple, but oh so useful.

[tags]Twitter, Social Media, Tools[/tags]