At Social Quant, we love Twitter. Twitter List. This is our bread and butter.
But using Social Quant alone isn’t going to make you a Twitter rock star – you need more!
You need great content, to engage with your followers, build relationships, analyze your efforts, participate in Twitter Chats, stay on top of trends, and enjoy all that the Twitterverse has to offer!
This is my list of Twitter Tools you can use for free or next to nothing to build your business through Twitter.
1. Buffer
Buffer let’s you schedule posts to your Twitter feed, search for content suggestions, hook up RSS feeds, and all for free. You can schedule up to 100 posts a month for free before you need to upgrade to the paid version called “Awesome Plan” for $10 a month.
2. HootSuite
As one of the leading social media management platforms, no doubt you’ve heard of HootSuite. With HS you set up streams to keep yourself organized. You can have a stream of your mentions, retweets, recent followers, your own tweets, favorites, direct messages, and more. And of course the ability to schedule your tweets for free with no limits is pretty spectacular.
3. SocialOomph
What SocialOomph does, that no other social media scheduling tool does, is allows you to create content buckets. You can create categories of content and fill those categories (buckets) with content. And then you tell SocialOomph when it should share the content from that bucket. It’s a really neat trick! Don’t be fooled when you look at SocialOomph – it doesn’t look like much but it’s definitely a good timesaving tool.
Oh Sprout Social, how I love thee. I constantly talk about Sprout Social because it’s my favorite social media scheduling tool. It’s not as budget friendly as Buffer, HootSuite or Post Planner, but it integrates with lots of other tools with ease, keeps all my social media engagements in one Smart Inbox, and gives some beautiful, easy-to-understand reports.
5. Post Planner
Post Planner lets you schedule posts to Facebook and Twitter, but what really sets them apart is their Viral Photos feature. They let you see what images are hot right now on social media from all your favorite pages. They really do help you “plan your posts” with proven content! Using images on Twitter is a must, and Post Planner makes it easy.
6. Tweetdeck
The ability to see all the updates of Twitter in real-time is amazing on Tweetdeck. You can filter searches, monitor multiple profiles, track events and hashtags, and never have to hit the refresh button again!
Measurement and analytics help you make better choices, increase your return on investment (ROI), and make you a better entrepreneur! Twitter analytics come free with your Twitter account and you can see what tweets are performing well, demographic information on your followers, and lots of really interesting stats about your Twitter profile.
8. SumAll
Along the same line as Twitter Analytics, SumAll lets you see your social media analytics for more than just Twitter. But what I really love about SumAll is that you can automate tweets about how many followers and unfollowers you got this week, what your reach was, and my personal favorite, you can thank your top retweeters! SumAll is a simple, visual analytics dashboard, which is why a lot of people really love it!
9. TweetChat
Have you participated in any Twitter chats yet? TweetChat lets you really participate in these real-time conversations with ease. Whether you’re hosting a chat or participating, TweetChat makes it easy to participate, follow along, and moderate.
11. Feedly
When it comes to Twitter, you have to tweet more to make an impact. One strategy you can use is curating content – personally, I’m a huge fan of this! And Feedly is the tool I use to make it easy. Feedly lets me organize blogs and publications online by topic and keep them in one place. Instead of manually visiting every blog I know I like to read, this puts them all in one stream so I can easily browse and really find what I want to read and share. Bonus! Feedly is free and integrates with Sprout Social for even easier curation.
12. IFTTT
If This, Then That or IFTTT, lets you create recipes for how you want your networks and applications to work together. For example, let’s talk about Instagram. You post a great photo that you think your Twitter followers would enjoy too. You can hit that “Twitter” button on Instagram to auto share it over but all they see is a link. Bummer. With IFTTT you can set up a recipe so that when you post to Instagram it actually uploads the photo to Twitter for you instead of just a link. There are so many uses outside of Twitter on IFTTT. Start digging into the recipes or make your own!
13. Hashtagify
Oh, the wonderful world of hashtags. Hashtagify helps you hone in on the popular hashtags that are trending worldwide, locally, and what your industry is using. My favorite use for Hashtagify is to put in a hashtag I use regularly and then find out what other hashtags are commonly used with it. For example, I put in #SocialMedia and found that people also like to use #SEO and #infographic when they tweet about #SocialMedia. Cool!
14. Social Quant
We have to mention Social Quant, or at least I do. I couldn’t very well write this post without telling you about SQ from my perspective. I, hands down, love this tool! It saves me HOURS of work time every week by following and unfollowing Twitter users on my behalf based on a select group of keywords of my choosing. Instead of spending all my time searching and then following, and then going back to unfollow, and trying to build a network, SQ takes that off my hands. It’s amazing what they can do! I’ve been using them for 75 days and they have taken me up 270% on my Twitter follower count. That’s INSANE. You have to check them out. No joke.
What Twitter tools do you use that you couldn’t be without?
