Top 5 Best Twitter Tools for Business

By Geoff Spick (@Goffee71) Oct 8, 2009

13 comments

Endless analysts, "social media experts" and pundits are telling you that it's imperative that you develop your Twitter presence. Yes, yes, yes…but what can you actually get out of it and what are the best tools with which to do this? We'll cleverly side-step the first question, thank you. As for the tools, here are what we consider the top 5 twitter tools worth some of your precious time.

1. CoTweet

Use: monitoring and interacting, scheduling tweets
Strengths: monitoring, multiple account support, team features, conversation view, free (for now)
Weaknesses: pricing likely to change, still in beta

Having secured over a million dollars of funding back in July, CoTweet not only has cash in the bank but an impressive list of existing clients including Ford, Starbucks and Microsoft (who is using CoTweet to help with its upcoming Windows 7 launch).

CoTweet helps companies monitor and interact with customers who use the micro-blogging service. You can monitor multiple twitter accounts, ideal if your company has multiple brands.

You monitor keywords and trends, to watch for spikes in mentions of a product or questions about a service that may need addressing.

Tweets can be viewed as conversations to make following a thread easier. Rosters can be set to assign monitoring duty and tweets can be assigned to other employees to deal with any customer issues or queries.

The Co-Tweet Client Interface - Link Statistics

Additionally, tweets can be scheduled for posting, perhaps to help as part of a teaser campaign, or just to provide regular updates when staff are otherwise occupied.

Links in your tweets can be tracked and, naturally, everything can be archived and the stats for clicks on your links can be analyzed.

Additional features include:

Multiple accounts and users
Monitor keywords and trends
Assign tweets to others
Threaded conversations
Rich profiles and click tracking
Scheduled tweets

CoTweet is still in beta with a paid-for solution expected sometime that will offer improved analytics and other features. The services is currently free, as in beer. Find out more at www.cotweet.com

2. TweetDeck

Use: monitoring topics and groups, tweeting, Facebook and MySpace integration
Strengths: monitoring multiple topics, multiple accounts, iphone support, free
Weaknesses: need VERY wide screen for more than a few topics

The Twitter website is next to useless for dedicated or business users. TweetDeck is an Adobe Air application that simplifies using the service and allows users to follow a wide number of topics on one screen.

If gathering information is essential to your business, you can follow as many topics as you wish, all on the one page.

Users can send tweets or direct messages with automatic URL shortening. A recent update to the rapidly evolving application also lets users update Facebook and MySpace accounts, allowing companies to maintain a constant message across the most popular social sites.