Chapter 23
Miscellaneous Tools
“Your hopes and friends are infinite.”
King Henry VIII
My final selection of Twitter tools is something of a mixed bag. I have test-driven them all, and each has a place in my toolkit for adding value to my personal brand on Twitter. They range from tools to track who has unfollowed you to tools that help you with your #FF Follow Friday recommendations. All are easy to use and practical. Whether you choose to incorporate all or just a few into your toolkit after trying them out, I guarantee you’ll have fun in the process.
ManageFlitter
This useful tool (see Figure 23-1) lets you clean up and manage your followers in just a few clicks. You can find out who is following you back, discover who has been inactive for a long time, and link your Google+ account to your Twitter account. I find the free version of ManageFlitter (limited to 1,000 follows or unfollows a day) is ample for my needs, but you can upgrade to a pro version providing unlimited usage for $12 per month.
Figure 23-1
ManageFlitter is a useful tool for keeping track of those who aren’t following you back and those accounts that are inactive.
Buffer
I find the Buffer app (see Figure 23-2) to be an incredibly useful tool for scheduling my daily personal-brand show’s content on Twitter. It’s different from the scheduling options in HootSuite and TweetDeck that help you schedule and send your tweets at a particular date and time but that have you enter details like titles and URLs, which can be time-consuming. Buffer has a different approach: You simply drop your links in your Buffer account to have this clever tool queue them for future publishing. Or you can use one of Buffer browser extensions to make adding tweets as simple as clicking an icon.
Buffer also has built-in analytics that let you monitor the impact of your tweets. Click the Analytics button in your Buffer account to see the number of retweets, number of clickthroughs, and the number of people each tweet you’ve “buffered” has reached. Buffer even sends you a reminder when you need to top up your scheduled tweets.
Buffer offers three account options. The free version lets you schedule 10 posts per day to Twitter, Facebook, and/or LinkedIn. The pro option costs $10 per month and lets you add up to six social accounts and increases your scheduling allowance to 50 posts a day. The premium version costs $99 per month and offers team scheduling options with unlimited accounts and unlimited posts daily.
Figure 23-2
Buffer lets you know when it needs topping up with tweets.
TweetLevel
TweetLevel (see Figure 23-3) is a great tool for checking both Twitter topics and Twitter users. You can also conveniently search and analyze hashtags to find out how popular your hashtags have been and to explore others. You can order Tweets by any results, including influence, popularity, engagement, and trust. TweetLevel also gives you a great array of options to find new people to follow.
Created by @jonnybentwood at the global PR agency Edelman, TweetLevel is free to users on a permanent beta basis, to ensure the continual improvement of its features and functionality.
Figure 23-3
As well as providing a score based on influence (like Klout and Kred), TweetLevel also look at factors such as trust and can explore the popularity of your hashtags as well as your tweets.
Twitter Tussle
Twitter Tussle is a totally free, fun, and addictive way to compare keywords on Twitter to see which is the more popular in the Twitterverse; in other words, which is being tweeting about the most. The tool is incredibly simple to use: Just visit the website www.twittertussle.com and enter any two words in the text boxes in the middle of the page. Then just click Tussle and watch the two blue Twitter birds enter the ring and fight it out over the popularity of their respective words.
Although a procrastination app, Twitter Tussle is a great way to compare how your personal brand is faring by measuring the popularity of your keywords and of your Twitter handle itself alongside other competitors in your particular sector.
FollowFriday Helper
FollowFriday Helper is an easy-to-use, totally free, and very useful Twitter tool, letting you see exactly who has mentioned you over the past seven days so you can reciprocate with an #FF recommendation or a #ThankYou via the tool itself. As someone who likes to thank all those who share my content as often as possible, this tool has become an invaluable part of my weekly Twitter toolkit, saving me time and ensuring that no-one gets overlooked.
Twitition
If you have a particular cause that you believe strongly in and want to invite others to join, Twitition is the tool for you. With it, you can create all sorts of online petitions for your campaigns and add the support of people around the world using your personal brand’s clout to ensure they tweet their allegiance. It’s completely free to use, and anyone can generate a campaign in just a few clicks. It’s an innovative way of earning money for charities you support or events you are sponsoring.
Blether
Blether lets you easily start a group chat with your followers. There are other tools that you can use to organize private chats such as Zendit and Tribalfish, but Blether offers the simplest option by far, and it’s free. Log in to Blether and enter the Twitter handles of the people you want to invite to your chat. Then give your chat a name by typing one into the subject box. The Twitter users you added are sent an invitation to join the chat, and the conversation can be followed in Blether through a simple chat area.
The creator of the chat has the control to remove a user, include more people, or move the chat to another window under a different name. Blether runs on any platform that uses URLs, including computers, smartphones, and tablets.
Nearby Tweets
Nearby Tweets (see Figure 23-4) is a free geolocation Twitter tool for social networking, building customer relationships, and monitoring real-time buzz. The tool is extremely useful for getting to know what’s being tweeted about in a particular location in real time, letting users network and connect with locals, find the tweeters nearby who have similar interests, monitor word of your personal brand in a specific location, or organize a local tweetup.
Figure 23-4
Nearby Tweets lets you get up-close and personal with those in your neighborhood using Twitter.
TweetBeep
Last, but definitely not least in my guide to the best Twitter tools for your personal branding toolkit, is TweetBeep. This incredibly useful tool has been featured in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times as one to watch. It’s like a Google Alerts for Twitter, keeping track of tweets that mention you, your products, your company, and anything that you ask it to track; it provides hourly updates. You can even keep track of who is tweeting your website or blog, even if they use a shortened URL (like those generated by Bit.ly or Tinyurl.com).
TweetBeep is a superior tool for online reputation management, catching all your replies and mentions, finding job and networking opportunities, and keeping up on your favorite interests. The excellent basic version is free to use, providing you don’t mind advertisements; for $20 per month, you get 200 ad-free alerts and a 15-minute alert option.