5 Twitter Tools You Should Be Using

I thought I would share my list of Twitter tools I think should be in everyone’s bookmarks. These tools improve the quality and productivity of my account by organizing, searching and analyzing the twitterverse.

TweetGrid is easily my favorite Twitter tool because of its simplicity and the important role it plays in my daily routine. It is basically the equivalent of Twitter Search with two major differences.

1. The twitter feed automatically updates so you don’t have to refresh the page. I take advantage of this by keeping TweetGrid open in a separate tab at all times so I can quickly check back and forth.
2. You can arrange multiple searches in a gridlike fashion to help track different conversations. I started using this feature during Red Sox games as a way to get the play by play along side people talking about the game.^{[Red Sox TweetGrid]}

At Magicomm we have a 6 panel TweetGrid up at all times to help us track conversations about our industry, find like minded Tweeps and monitor conversations around our services. TweetGrid has been the best tool to help us monitor Twitter in real time with ease.

TweetWorks has only been around since November but has since changed the way I Tweet. I’ve always been a fan of threaded comments; like in FriendFeed and Plurk. Now I’ve got what I always wanted out of Twittter, organized conversations.

TweetWorks head tweeter Mike Langford is doing a great job getting the conversations going at this new hot spot. The community is still relatively small but seems to be growing steadily as people see the added benefit of the service.

Twitter Grader evaluates your Twitter profile and grades you among the rest of the Tweeps that have been graded. The higher your score, the better Tweeter you are. Well almost, but it is a great means by which to measure the success of any Twitter account.

The best thing about Twitter Grader is all of its features:

• You can locate other Tweeters in your area as well as other like minded Tweeps.
• You can see an up to date list of the “Twitter Elite”.
• You can check to see if a specific user is following you.
• It suggests its own list of like minded Tweeps for you to follow.
• You can log in to speed through the system with ease and follow at will.

And the list seems to keep growing as the HubSpot team are all very active and experienced Twitterers.

BrightKite associates your status updates and pictures to times and places. I usually use it as a means of sending pictures to Twitter from my cell phone. It’s also an easy way to find other Twitter users in the area. Granted this might not be considered an actual “Twitter Tool” however its integration with Twitter and other popular social networks^[1][2] makes this a must have for your social media arsenal.

I seem to bump into this service fairly regularly when browsing the social web and am always pleased by its flexibility. If you ever wanted an easy way to sort out those Twitter quitters and catch up on some new followers you may have missed, then this is your tool. The tool basically organizes your followers and following for easy management

Sometimes this services seems to be down in which case I jump over to Friend or Follow.