Three Twitter Apps That Rock!

Do you feel like you are drowning in a social media tsunami? Whether your daily dose is mainly from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn or the gazillion other social media outlets that seem to be propagating at a viral level, it feels overwhelming when all that data just keeps coming, and there seems little you can do to stop it – short of throwing your computer out the window.

Watch this video because the text below is not a transcript!

Since everyone is talking about Twitter [almost all the time] let’s concentrate on the little blue bird of microblogging. I spend much of my day digging around in social media so I have a few tools that I use that help me make sense of it all and I thought I would share three Twitter Apps [that rock] with you.

I first started managing my Twitter feed using the desktop based Adobe Air application Tweetdeck. It’s a good looking app and a Twitter [and Facebook] dashboard so you can see what’s going on it both worlds – very handy. You can set up multiple accounts which is useful but what makes it rock, and what you want in a useful twitter client, is that you can set up different columns so you can have multiple displays from searches, groups, replies (which are often lost in the deluge,) direct messages, and pull in photos from the like of twitpic. The pop up notifier can be a real distraction, so be warned!

I am also a fan of Hootsuite. Very much like Tweetdeck this web based app shines even brighter for two reasons – scheduled tweets and stats. You can spend a few minutes every morning and just schedule tweets to go out throughout the day which frees you up from doing it later, and then you can check up on how many clicks your tweets get and from which region they originate. Now that is cool. For more detail on whether a human or a bot is responding to your tweets check out budurl.com which gives awesome stat info for your shortened urls.

A new player, TweetGlide, is like Tweetdeck and Hootsuite on steroids. Mainly for extreme marketing promotions because it allows you to show paid sponsored ads in their network that look like tweets. This Adobe Air app will let you tweet unlimited characters [what?!] and shorten the url for you so that your sales message lives on. You can choose from several url shortening services and manage multiple Facebook and Twitter accounts. TweetGlide also tracks tweets, as well as clicks, but it also allows you to bulk follow and unfollow so you don’t have to use Twitter Karma.

Managing your social media yourself can be done but the easiest way to do it is to pick a few sites and stick with them. Don’t sign up for everything you see, take the time to work out what functions are available and then pick the site, or sites, that best fits your needs – especially if you are using social media for business.

All in all these three apps will get whatever Twitter job you need done, and done well. If you are tweeting for yourself Tweetdeck is great for managing your tweets; if you are tweeting for business and need to know stats and want to free up your time by scheduling tweets then Hootsuite is for you; want to take your business tweeting to another level? Then try on TweetGlide for size.

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