From reading this blog you may think that I am a Facebook fanatic.  And you may be right!  However I do believe Twitter is an amazing marketing tool.  As with all networking strategy is key so this week I I’m sharing my pick of Twitter marketing tools.

Tweriod

For those of you who follow the Spiderworking.com Facebook page you will know that Tweriod was featured this week as the ‘Monday Morning Cool Tool’.

Knowing when your followers are online will help you target them more accurately.  You can discover this with trial and error, sending out tweets at different times of the day and measuring which get the most click thrus but Tweriod makes it a lot easier.  Tweriod analyses the behaviour of your Twitter followers providing you with a report telling you when they are most active online.  With this data you can make sure you are tweeting when the most people are there to see them.

This is a great tool but I wouldn’t recommend tweeting exclusively at optimum times, Tweriod isn’t able to distinguish between influential or brand advocate tweeters and regular followers and you don’t want to loose an already captive audience.  However if you discover that the majority of your followers are online at a time that you don’t usually tweet you can easily adjust your Twitter behavior to accommodate them.

Hootsuite

As regular blog readers may have noticed I’m a massive advocate of Hootsuite (affiliate link).  Hootsuite allows you to manage your Twitter account but it also has lots of great marketing features.

1. Once you have used Tweriod to discover when your followers are online you can schedule your Tweets using Hootsuite and target them at these optimum times.
2. Using the search function you can target potential customers and find new people to follow.  To find out more about this feature have a look at my video: How to find customers on Twitter using Hootsuite.
3. You can measure the effectiveness of your Tweets by counting click thrus from the inbuilt link shortener.
4. Finally you can use the ‘old fashioned’ RT method at the click of a button ensuring that those you are ReTweeting never miss a mention.

Bit.ly

Bit.ly is probably the most popular link shortening service on the social web.  Link shorteners allow you to take a really long web link and make it small, the advantage being that you can add it to a tweet and still have plenty of your 140 characters left for comment.  If you are not a Hootsuite convert yet Bit.ly is a great alternative to the inbuilt Ow.ly.  It integrates easily with lots of other social media tools including TweetDeck.  Just like Hootsuite it allows you to see how many click thrus a specific shortened link gets. You can also customise links to make them more memorable, very handy when sharing a link verbally.

Klout

Who are your most influential followers?  Who is most likely to get content shared or get links clicked? Klout measures the reach and amplification of each Twitter user and gives them a score.  You can check out your own Klout score as well as that of any Twitter user.  It’s a great research tool and an interesting way to benchmark yourself against you competitors.

The real benefit of Klout is that you can determine who from your brand advocates has the widest reach on Twitter.  What can you do to reward them for sharing your content and how can you encourage them to share more?  Don’t leave people with low Klout scores behind though, these could be the influencers of the future.

Some of these suggestions may seem a little cold but it is important to have a strategy and know how to measure your efforts.  I believe as long as you are transparent, human and yourself there is no harm using a few tools to assist you to market efficiently on Twitter.  Do you agree? Do you have a Twitter tool that you can’t live without?  I’d love to hear what you think so please do leave a comment below.

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