10 Twitter Tools to Boost Your Efficiency

Twitter recently announced that over 200 million Tweets are posted each day. This is an incredible figure, underlying the success of the service. Spending time on Twitter boasts plenty of advantages, yet I’ve found that one can get easily sucked in and spend too much time than is good for our workflow.

So here are 10 great tools that I am using each day to make the most of Twitter, whilst still remaining productive.

Buffer – Tweet More Great Content

Reading news and browsing Twitter always were two different things for me. With Buffer, whenever you find an interesting post, you can add it to your Buffer. This means, instead of posting it right away, Buffer will space it out over the day.

You can do this from wherever you are with the handy browser extensions for Chrome, Safari or Firefox. This means, you can continue reading, knowing that you will share the content throughout the day with your followers.

Best bit: What I find very handy is that for every tweet sent via Buffer you will receive detailed analytics on number of clicks, retweets and reach.

Tweriod – Tweet Only When Others Listen

An App that has helped me greatly to optimize my Tweeting habits is Tweriod. You will receive detailed stats on when your best times to Tweet are and you can then set them up as fixed tweeting times in Buffer for example.

Although Tweriod is not the first App providing you with stats on best times to Tweet, it boasts the most detailed algorithm analyzing data from both your past tweets and your followers. This makes the results highly relevant I found.

Best bit: In addition to stats on best times of the day and best days of the week, the App also shows you a different graph for when @mentions are most likely to happen.

StrawberryJ.am – Read Only Most Mentioned Tweets

One App that I have started to use very frequently is an App called StrawberryJ.am. It pulls in all tweets from the people you are following and organizes the tweets in a new Twitter stream. It does so by only showing you the most mentioned links amongst your friends.

The display of these Tweets is also very handy as it gives you a preview of the links. It is very handy that you can also set up search terms or Twitter lists and receive the same new order of top tweets from your stream.

Best bit: Instead of having another site you need to check each morning, you can receive daily updates about your top stories straight to your inbox.

TwentyFeet – Full Analytics for Your Twitter Account

You can see TwentyFeet like a Google Analytics for your Twitter account. In easy to understand graphs you are shown all the important metrics about you and your tweets. This means a display of changes in follower count, mentions count or number of retweets.

It is definitely worth mentioning that you can also connect your Facebook business page or personal account to find out about similar stats from there. Having tested many different Twitter analytics Apps this one definitely comes out on top.

In addition to email updates and benchmark notifications, I love the weekly summary the App provides you with all in less than 140 characters.

ManageFlitter – Get Rid of Unwanted Followers

You will have probably come across several Apps that allow you to unfollow others. Yet, non of the ones I found makes it that simple and hassle free in the way ManageTwitter does. With just a few clicks you can unfollow all those that don’t add enough value for you.

This means you are shown people you follow that don’t follow you back, are no longer on Twitter or simply clutter your stream with too many updates. ManageFlitter filters them out and gives you suggestions to unfollow them.

Best bit: What I like best is that there is no need to create an account. You arrive, unfollow those you don’t like and off you go again.

Twilert – Google Alerts for Twitter

Twilert basically does what it says. You can set up certain terms to monitor a brand, events or other topics of interest. The App will then send you daily updates on tweets mentioning your given terms.

You can refine your search terms in great details. You can specify whether you want to see @mentions, #hashtags or normal word occurrences. It is also very handy to determine the language to stop similar words from other languages of coming up.

Best bit: One feature I was particularly impresses with was that you are able to set up sentiment tracking for Twilerts so that only positive or negative finds are coming up.

Proxlet – Mute Twitter Noise

This App offers a very innovative solution to get rid of Twitter noise. Instead of unfollowing you can just mute certain followers temporarily. By installing the Chrome extension it will automatically filter out the ones you indicate for you.

In addition to individual users, you can also mute spammy Apps or hashtags. This can be very helpful if there is an event or Twitterchat going on that clutters your stream, but you don’t want to unfollow the people tweeting about it.

Best bit: In addition to functioning on Twitter.com, the App also works inside TweetDeck, Twitter for iPhone or Twitdroyd.

Keepstream – Make Beautiful Collections of Tweets

One App that I started to use regularly is Keepstream. You can search your stream, lists or hashtags for interesting Tweets and add them to a new collection of Tweets. Upon finishing your collection you can publish it as a public page.

I found this very handy to create transcripts of events or Twitterchats, that I wanted to share with others. If you collect Tweets with links, you will get a preview of the post. Additionally it displays all people mentioned in the Tweet separately in the sidebar.

Best bit: What is most useful here is that you are able to embed your collection into a blogpost, making for a quick and beautiful solution if you are hard on ideas.

Hashable – Use Twitter for Contact Management

Who said that collecting and exchanging business cards needs to be boring? Hashable offers you fun and useful way of tracking your relationships. Whenever you meet someone you can tweet them an #intro hashtag and Hashable creates an entry.

This allows you to collect details on the go and also offers you a simple solution to keep track of all the people you meet. Of course, instead of tweeting publicly, you can also choose to make intros via Hashable only.

Best bit: What I love is that you can see a built in stream displaying all the connections and relationships your relationships are building.

Twylah – Create Customized Twitter Fanpages

Last but not least comes an App that I discovered only a few weeks back. It takes all your Tweets and orders them like a fully fledged blog on a new personalized Twylah page for you. I found this to be a great way of showing others which content you are tweeting about.

The algorithm of the App works very well and relates similar Tweets with each other in corresponding categories. This means, that all your interests in various topics are well organized and easy to browse through for others.

Best bit:There is a nifty feature called “Power Tweet”, which has shown to create far more engagement than blogposts, as it displays limited media content alongside relevant Tweets all next to it.

Conclusion

I hope that some of these Apps make handling Twitter easier for you. In my case, they allow me to work more productively, yet still be very genuinely present on Twitter.

What do you think? Are there any amongst the above Tools you would find useful too?

This was a guest post written by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer App. Buffer is a great way to schedule tweets, and we’re glad to feature it along with these other great Twitter apps. We’d like to thank him for taking the time to write this article, and wish him and his team the best with Buffer!