Free Website Tools
Free Website Tools

In the early days of Twitter you could simply follow most of your own followers for interesting and relevant tweets. But the number of people who will follow anyone just to get their name out and hope for a follow back has grown immensely. An easier way to find people to follow is by using FollowFinder. You’ll find out who tweets on similar topics and who has similar followers. You can follow right from the interface, without having to open another tab. This is a simple and efficient Twitter app.

For comprehensive Twitter influence and engagement analytics like Clout, Generosity, Referenced, Retweet Ratio and more, try Twitalyzer. If you’re running a business and you’re wondering about what impact or influence your social media activity really has, you can measure how your scores are changing – and hopefully improving – between measurements, view graphs and use them to drill down to daily activity and which and how many unique users retweet your tweets. Twitalyzer’s subscription service for business owners adds automatic processing, multiple accounts and alerts.

Create free Twitter backgrounds at twitbacks.com. The site will let you choose from over 80 background designs, add links to your social networking accounts to your background and brand it with your own photo, bio or logo. Choose from photos, nature designs, cars, artistic, or custom backgrounds.

Find out what percentage of traffic on Twitter contains a particular hashtag on hashtag.org. You get a graph for the past week which includes daily and hourly numbers. Clicking on the graph will get you 30 day data and if you sign in (free registration) you will also be able to view 90 day and 180 day data which is served by trendistic.com.

Search for keywords inside Twitter bios is made simple with the search feature on TweepSearch’s website. Native Twitter search covers lots of types of searches already, but if you’re looking for specific keywords within Twitter accounts’ bios, it’s impossible to get clear results. For example, try a Twitter search for ‘webdesigner’ and you’ll see that unless you use the keyword ‘webdesigner’ as your actual name, you won’t come up in the search results at all. TweepSearch lets you search within the bios of the followers of a specific user, or all the bios on Twitter in general.

Turn long URLs into short ones for posting on Twitter, using in e-mails, cloaking affiliate links and for redirects with URL shortening service TinyURL. By clicking on “preview feature” you can also preview the link to see where it’s taking you before clicking it (works with cookies). Short URLs created by TinyURL don’t break and don’t expire.

Try TinyURL here:

Another popular app for Twitter is hootsuite, which lets you manage multiple users over multiple accounts. Create groups, manage your feeds into Twitter, schedule tweets and view user info without leaving your current window.

There are so many services available now for managing Twitter – how do you know which one to choose? Why not sign up with the top three that appeal to you most and simply try them. You can make a checklist of the features that are most important to you: Do you like the interface? Can you customize the interface to your needs? Does it allow you to add as many users as you need to? How many accounts can you add? Does it allow you to share and manage tweets with other users in your group? How long can you save tweets to share or work on later? How many can you save? How useful are the statistics? Do they give you the numbers you need? Does it have integrated Twitter search? Does it have way more features than you need? Are they planning to charge you for the service in the near future? etc.

It may take some of your time, but finding the right Twitter management app will save you a lot of hassle later on.

Manage up to six Twitter accounts through a single CoTweet login. You can work as a team with your colleagues, add your personal Twitter account and manage all your tweeting through one interface. You can also assign tweets to your colleagues for follow up, schedule tweets and post to multiple accounts at the same time. This service is currently free, but may charge in the future.

Create awareness throughout Twitter for your non-profit campaign by adding a Twibbon to your Twitter avatar.

Start a petition on Twitter with TinyPetition. Create your petition and TinyPetition will help you ‘collect’ signatures from Twitter users. Simple interface and easy to use.