Econsultancy recently published an article on their blog, “How to extend your Twitter experience by using third party tools”.
This caught our attention because it’s a question we are often asked and with so many bad tools out there, it’s always useful to have a list of the good ones. Drawing partly from Econsltancy’s list with the addition of a few of our own favourites, find listed below a collection of third party tools that we believe could improve your Twitter experience.
Bit.ly
No doubt you’ve heard of Bit.ly, the popular URL shortener. There are a number of Bit.ly tools available that make sharing links on Twitter an all-round better experience.
The Bit.ly toolbar extension for Chrome is a handy add-on which allows you to quickly and easily share links on Twitter without leaving the page you’re on. There’s also an extension for Firefox too. It also supports multiple Twitter accounts.
The bit.ly Sidebar bookmarklet is also a useful tool that gives you all the Bit.ly features right from your browser.
Bit.ly is a great tool for tracking click activity on the links you share on Twitter.
Google real-time search
Twitter’s search engine has a few issues, the main issue being, it’s rubbish. It’s unreliable and only has a 2 or 3 week searchable history. Fine if you’re searching for stuff in the now, but what if you need to access a tweet for a few months back?
There is a solution in the form of Google Real Time Search, which archives tweets and allows you to search for them from the Google search bar.
By using the ‘Timeline’ tool on the top-right of the Google results page, you can drill down into a specific period of time before undertaking a search query.
For more details on how to use Google Real Time Search to search for tweets, check out this blog – explicitly.me.
Topsy
Topsy is a ‘realtime search engine powered by the social web’ that indexes and ranks search results based upon the most influential conversations relevant to your search query.
Results can be filtered by tweets, photos, web or ‘experts’ and can also be filtered by time – past hour, past week etc.
Topsy also allows you to tweet your results directly from the results page.
Formulists
Formulists is a list creation and management tool that allows you to generate personalised Twitter lists that continuously self-update. Formulists-generated lists can be viewed or deleted from any Twitter client and will continue to self-update without the need to return to the Formulists website.
For example, you could create self-updating lists for people who have recently followed you, recently un-followed you, people you have recently talked to and so on and so on. You can also customise and filter your existing Twitter lists.
This is a really useful tool if you’re managing a big Twitter network.
Tweepi
Ever wanted to know who isn’t following you back? Tweepi can provide that information for you. This is a good tool for cleaning up the deadbeats and unfollowing those who aren’t returning your follow. Using a tick-box system you can unfollow multiple users in one hit.
On the flip-side, it shows you who’s following you and lets you follow them back.
Trunk.ly
By connecting into your social networks, Trunk.ly monitors and collects the links that you share across the social web.
It does two key things: firstly, it strips out all of the chatter that comes with the tweet.
Secondly, it places all links found in your tweets in a nice long page and displays media (photos and videos) on the page itself.
You can also tag links for categorisation.
FollowerWonk
Followerwonk is an excellent tool for finding people based on the information they’ve added about themselves in their Twitter bios.
There are, for example 263 results for ‘copywriters in London’ and 300 results for ‘designers in London’. Try it for yourself.
You can sort results by relevance, follower count or friend count. There’s also a feature that lets you compare 2 or more profiles, which is useful for weighing yourself up against competitors.
TweetTwain
An all in one Twitter application that lets you manage multiple accounts. The usability may not be as good as the likes of TweetDeck or HootSuite, but TweetTwain does offer some excellent features. You can set up keywords to trigger auto follows, auto reply’s and auto retweets, if that’s your thing.
Mentions and retweets are displayed in easy to read lists which give a much better snapshot than any other Twitter tool. There’s also a chat box for following hashtag conversations.
A neat feature is the ability to import and export tweets as csv. files, really handy for reporting purposes.
For a full list of features and to download TweetTwain, visit www.tweettwain.com.
Favorious
Billed as ‘the best of Twitter, based on favourites’, Favorious allows you to search for and filter ‘favourited’ tweets.
Whether it’s for plain curiosity, business or for research purposes, Favorious lets you see which tweets are being favourited. It also allows you to sort, filter and tag your own favourites, a feature which Twitter itself doesn’t allow.
Perhaps one of the most useful features of this tool is the ability to search for Twitter users and view how popular they are based on how many of their tweets have been favourited. It goes without saying that this research can yield some very helpful information.
About.me
Not exclusively a Twitter tool, but worthy of a mention. About Me is a really useful place to aggregate your web presence into one place.
You can link various sites including Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, WordPress, Last FM, Flickr and various other sites. You can also add an ‘email me’ button should you wish.
The profile editing options allow for good degree of design personalisation too.
Adding the link to your Twitter bio will allow your followers to see all of your links in one place. Here’s an example; about.me/mattbatterham.
Thanks to Econsultancy for their original post.
Happy tweeting!
