Three Twitter Tools I Can’t Live Without

Posted by Sharon Hurley Hall on March 31st, 2009

This post has been submitted by Sharon Hurley Hall from Get Paid To Write Online.com.

It’s been about a year since I discussed my issues with Tuning In To Twitter. In that time, I have used Twitter more and more, but find that increasingly, I need to use other tools to get the most from it. Here are three of my favorites.

Tweetree

One of the difficulties with Twitter is in following the conversation, something that Plurk has addressed very well. If you want to be able to see conversations in Twitter without having to click backwards from tweet to tweet, then Tweetree might be the answer. To get started, login with your Twitter credentials. Your home page looks pretty much as it does in Twitter, but at the side of each tweet there are buttons for retweeting, replying, favoriting and linking to the original post. At the side of the timeline are tabs leading you to different Twitter features. The winner for me is that when someone replies to a tweet, you see the reply with the original in a tree-like interface, hence the name. I’ve been using Tweetree for a couple of months and really like this.

TweetGrid

While most people are extolling the benefits of TweetDeck (and now that it incorporates Facebook I might have to look at it again), I prefer TweetGrid. It’s not pretty, but it allows me to see several Twitter windows within a single browser window. This is great because I run a Twitter account for a corporate client. While I use Tweetree for my personal account, on Tweetgrid I have panels open for the home page updates, replies, my updates and any keywords I am tracking for the client. I can tweet and add hashtags right from the same page, so this is really useful (and saves me from having to login and logout of multiple accounts all the time). You can also use Tweetgrid to manage multiple accounts, but for that I prefer to use Hootsuite

HootSuite

Hootsuite, the owl formerly known as Brightkit is a great tool. It incorporates a dashboard where you can track as many Twitter accounts as you want (I am tracking two), a tweet window, a URL shortener and stats. If you share a lot of links and want to see if people are clicking on them, then this is a real winner. Of course, it only tracks URLs you have shortened with its Owly URL shortener, but it’s a start. It’s got a nice, easy to read interface and is adding functionality all the time, including, most recently, the ability to tweet to multiple accounts at once. A couple of clicks even lets you see conversations, so Hootsuite could eventually replace Tweetree for me.

Which are your favorite Twitter interface improvements?

Sharon Hurley Hall
Get Paid To Write Online.com
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One Response to “Three Twitter Tools I Can’t Live Without”

Franchise Finance Says:
April 2nd, 2009 at 10:24 am
We as a business have joined twitter, thanks for the tip. We’ll let you know the progress