Twitter Tools of the Pros

Can you imagine pushing a nail in without a hammer? Or driving a screw into a wall without a screw driver? It simply is not possible. Social Media professionals would not be as successful without their tools either. The manual labor of social media would become very exhausting and hard to keep up with. However, don’t be overwhelmed by the amount of tools out there, for there are a select few that can definitely make your life much easier. Let’s start with one of my favorites.

Bit.ly
Most people know of Bit.ly as a tool designed to shorten URL links for the purpose of saving character space on Twitter. What most people aren’t aware of is that Bit.ly also serves other important functions. Starting with the dreaded statistic, Bit.ly can help you see the stats for any links that you have shared through your dashboard, and it also lets you plug the Bit.ly URL into Tweet deck, or Twitter feed (to be discussed later) so that you can track and monitor the links you share through those applications. Lastly, if you have an absurd budget (starting at $995/month), Bit.ly can give you the opportunity to create your own short custom domain names in order to align the URL with your company’s brand. Amazon has their custom URL set to ‘amzn.to’ while Mashable has ‘on.mash.to’. Pretty simple, and very useful.

Buffer
Many experts claim that Buffer is the smartest way to tweet because it allows you to schedule the tweets you publish during different times of the day so that you don’t flood your followers with too much content in a short period of time. The additional bonus on this tool is that it also provides detailed analytics on your tweets in order for you to determine what content is most accepted by the audience, as well as which content is not. Best part about the analytics side is that it lets you know the times of day where you get the most action off your tweets.

HootSuite
One of my personal favorites here has definitely got to be HootSuite. This is probably the best tool you can get for free which allows you to utilize all of its features as long as you are managing fewer than five profiles. However, with the $5.99 per month subscription, you can make an unlimited amount of profiles to manage, and it even comes with enhanced analytics. We, at Boxless Media, use HootSuite’s paid edition to manage all of our clients social media and To keep it short and Hoot suite, you simply can’t go wrong by using this tool since after all, it’s by far one of the most popular ones out right now.

Paper.li
This application is unique in a couple of ways. To start, it allows you to collect and curate tweets in a format that looks similar to newspapers. These curated tweets can be manually or automatically shared on your twitter account too. Now why would anyone care about this tool in specific? Well, because this app is by far one of the best ways to gather top tweets from your followers, people on your twitter list, and even anyone who mentions your hashtag.

Tweet Deck
Ahh, we’re finally here. This desktop management tool has similar features to HootSuite by allowing you to create organized columns, track specific Twitter activity, and even (kind of) send longer messages. Using their deck.ly services, you can direct your followers to the rest of your Tweet. It has a great layout and user interface, but isn’t always the best option for users who utilize multiple computers. If you generally only use one of two computers, this is fantastic. If you use more than that, a browser-based application would be the best recommendation instead.

Twitter Feed
In terms of curating, this is definitely a winner due to its very interesting feature that lets you add RSS feeds directly through your Facebook, Twitter, and social media accounts. Each time there is a new update on the accounts, the tool will let you share it automatically, while giving you the option to customize the tweet to show the title of each post, the shortened link, as well as a retweet option so that you can let your favorite bloggers know you’re sharing their content. The only warning I would advise with this is to ensure that you follow quality content in order to be able to curate high quality material. Nevertheless, this tool might be my second favorite to HootSuite.

No matter what industry you are in, a toolbox is always important. If you manage social media, check out some of these tools, I promise you they will make your life easier.

Thank you to Abraham Villegas of Boxless Media for contributing this article today.